Making sense of protected area conflicts and management approaches: A review of causes, contexts and conflict management strategies

Although it has been established that there is a strong geographical component to conflicts, previous studies on Protected Area (PA) conflicts have tended to focus on assessing the underlying causes of PA conflicts without considering how these conflicts vary across development contexts. Our review therefore assessed the similarities and differences that characterise PA conflicts in developing and developed countries with the view to drawing the implications of the findings for management practice. We reviewed a total of 65 publications from an initial pool of 516 drawn from biological, ecological, social sciences as well as an emerging interdisciplinary literature in conservation conflict studies from 1993 to 2016. Results of this literature review indicate that: 1) the types of PA conflict, why they occur, where they occur and how they are managed varied between developed and developing countries and were determined by geographical location and specific socio-economic and cultural contexts; 2) while PA conflicts in developing countries were primarily driven by impacts on livelihoods, PA conflicts in developed countries were driven by social considerations including emotional, recreational and cultural values people attached to PAs; and 3) conflict management strategies that promoted participation of other stakeholders including local people in PA management and provided economic incentives to local people promoted cooperation and fostered the meeting of conservation goals while conflict management strategies which employed deterrent strategies such as guards, fencing and policing especially in developing countries often resulted in resentment and sometimes led to the escalation of the conflicts. Conflict management strategies must therefore take into consideration the differences in the context within which conflicts develop at various locations to inform the specific conflict management strategies to be applied.