Delegated protected area management 913


NGOs. Through decentralization initiatives, local govern- ments are increasingly enabled to take on responsibilities, including the management of protected areas. Expertise in this area is limited, however, and delegated management would allow decentralized governments to enhance their expertise through collaboration with experienced inter- national or national private partners (Scholte et al., 2021a).


Funding


In addition to improved operational management, general expectations of delegated management include raising increased funding, a bottleneck for most protected areas (Balmford et al., 2003). Although there is widespread recog- nition of the capacity of private partners to administer funds, the funding that underlies most delegated manage- ment partnerships is usually seen as short-term project funding, not different from typical technical and financial support (Baghai et al., 2018). Among the 20 protected areas with delegated management in West and Central Africa, only Akagera and Nyungwe National Park in Rwanda have revenues, albeit dominated by income from tourism, which cover most of their management costs (Scholte et al., 2018). Whereas previously expectations were based on achieving financial independence for pro- tected areas, the dominant theme has become managing protected areas as businesses, with international public funding complemented by philanthropic donations. How- ever, the dependence on international public develop- ment assistance funding in West and Central Africa brings additional responsibilities. The EU, which accounts for ap- proximately one-third of the funding for the protected areas considered here (Scholte et al., 2018), justifies the funding as being for both conservation and security (EU, 2019). This has given EU-funded projects, notably those in zones of instability and border areas (Chinko in the Central African Republic, Garamba and Virunga), responsibilities that go beyond conservation, which raises additional questions about the capacity of the private conservation partners. An alternative source of funding is so-called sustainable


funding, generally through annual contributions from con- servation trust funds, where the capital is based on inputs from official development assistance or private funding (Doinjashvili et al., 2020). At the time of writing, four of the 20 protected areas considered here have such trust funds, independent from the private partner, that covers up to half of their management costs (Table 1; Scholte et al., 2021a). FourDRCWorld Heritage Sites with delegated management have a trust fund in preparation. The World Wide Fund for Nature has been the only private partner to initiate a long-term funding mechanism when it was still a project implementer in Dzanga-Sangha (Central African Republic), a park it is now managing. Sustainable funding has its time limits, however, and with present low


interest rates the prospect that these contributions may in- crease in the short- tomedium-termare limited (Doinjashvili et al., 2020). The concept of a nation state is that it is an entity that will persist and has a permanent tax base; this suggests that one should not rely on delegated manage- ment partnerships, nor on sustainable funding mechanisms, for periods longer than several decades (H. Prins, pers. comm., 2021).


Capacity development


It is not surprising that the development of national ca- pacities in protected area management has been at the forefront of discussions on partnerships (Baghai et al., 2018; Scholte et al., 2018). In several parks with large multi-donor programmes, the number of expatriate staff can be considerable (.20) but there are generally few plans in place for developing the competence and ca- pacity of national management staff preparing to take over their responsibilities. A good example, however, is Garamba, which has a training plan that outlines how middle-level national staff could be trained to take over. The number of expatriate staff tends to increase with pro- ject funding, often targeting community development, carrying the risk of delegated management being strongly dependent on short-term funding and creating a vicious circle of dependency on expatriate expertise.


Confidence and contracting conditions


One of the main factors of success identified has been the level of confidence between public and private partners, in particular among the individuals most involved (Scholte et al., 2021a). Sources of conflict are often a result of poor communication and lack of transparency, not only between public and private partners but also with the wider public, resulting in the partnership being the sole responsibility of the protected area authority as the signer of the contract, and not of the state as a whole. Mutual expectations are not always clearly expressed in


contracts at the start of delegated management initiatives. This is also the case for the greatest asset of parks, wildlife, which has seldom been monitored and evaluated systemat- ically and independently. Such monitoring facilitates a more objective evaluation of the effectiveness of protected area management, and also prevents any inappropriate claims of increases in wildlife following a change in management. However, even when expectations are clearly expressed


in the contract, they are not always implemented. A striking example are evaluations of partnerships, which were written into all the 17 contracts I have seen (Table 1). Of the partner- ships considered here, some 13 evaluations should have been conducted, although I amaware to date of only five (Scholte et al., 2021a).


Oryx, 2022, 56(6), 908–916 © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605321000752


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