Linking workforce capacity development with protected area management effectiveness assessments

Clearly, establishing protected areas is a critical element of protecting and preserving our global biodiversity but the effective management of these protected areas to meet conservation goals is equally critical to this success. Many protected area management effectiveness (PAME) methodologies have evolved over the last several decades, and these efforts have been very important for determining resource adequacy and effectiveness of organizational level management practices. However, there remains much needed discussion of how protected area managers can improve management effectiveness since several meta-analyses have estimated that “only 20–50% of protected areas assessed were found to be effectively managed”. The purpose of this paper is to acknowledge the advancements made by the PAME movement in assessing the effectiveness of protected area management, but also the benefit of supplemental workforce capacity assessments to address some of the issues raised through the PAME analysis. We propose a more comprehensive model of protected area effectiveness that couples the strengths of PAME studies with the diagnostic value of competence-based analyses of workforce capacity.