Adaptive Co-Management Thresholds: Understanding Protected Areas Policy as Normative Conflict

Abstract

Protected areas have increasingly become a policy tool in biodiversity conservation. The popularity of these areas is reflected by increases in both the absolute number and geographic extent of the protection granted. In implementing policy, modern protected areas have turned to adaptive co-management strategies to resolve frequent issues between environmental welfare and human interests. Adaptive co-management is perceived as an effective policy strategy to resolve such problems in that it appears to allow a greater degree of procedural justice by calling for greater participation by local communities in policy decisions, thereby enabling a greater likelihood for distributive justice in locating nature-human interdependencies responsive to diverse affected interests. This discussion, however, posits that adaptive co-management as a policy strategy is flawed because its inherent dynamic destabilizes its capacity to resolve potential conflicts between protected areas and local communities. This paper construes such situations epistemologically, asserting that the dynamic of adaptive co-management extends beyond law and policy to an essential normative conflict. Hence, the adaptive co-management model should be viewed as a normative subject requiring a normative analysis.