Search for: All records

A common narrative about protected areas (PAs) is that social benefits accrue globally whereas burdens are felt locally, particularly in lower income countries. Researchers tend to focus on conflicts, and data on perceptions of PAs tend to be very locally specific and disproportionately available across regional contexts. As a result, we know surprisingly little about how benefits from PAs are distributed among local populations. Here, we use data from the Wildlife Conservation Society’s social monitoring program to map patterns of perceived benefits from more than 3,500 households around five PAs in Central Africa and Madagascar. We examine where benefits are perceived and what benefits are perceived. We find that in all five cases, the majority (55–84 percent) of households aware of the PAs perceive some form of benefit, but sources and spatial patterns of benefits vary significantly. We draw from these patterns to propose that, at least for forest PAs in lower income regions, surrounding forest cover might be a key factor conditioning the frequency, spatial arrangement, and type of perceived benefits. Research on the social impacts of PAs should attend to this geographic variation. Closer attention to variability in local perceptions of PA benefits can improve conservation practice by informing where different types of programming might be best received and flagging potential for long-standing local inequalities to either be mitigated or perpetuated by interventions associated with PAs.