People, Protected Areas and Global Change. Participatory conservation in Latin America, Africa, Asia and Europe
Marc Galvin, Tobias Haller
Abstract
This is an important contribution to the literature on protected areas and the political ecology of natural resource management and conservation. It provides a very timely analysis of "participatory" PA governance and management, examining "new paradigm" PA approaches which - in policy and rhetoric if not always in practice - offer alternatives to the fortress conservation approaches that have so often proved environmentally ineffective, socially disastrous and morally questionable. The editors and 31 contributors "tried to determine how the participatory approach to conservation evolved in specific settings and who profits from the new approach." Drawing on research by 13 research groups working in diverse regions of the global South (South America, sub-Saharan Africa, and South and Southeast Asia) and in Switzerland, the book offers a set of coordinated case studies that are attentive to historical, geographical, political, social, and economic contexts and dynamics. (Stan Stevens, Univ. of Massachusetts)