People's attitudes towards parks, wildlife tourism and park management.

Local residents’ perception of benefits and losses from living around protected areas in India and Nepal

Krithi K. Karanth • Sanjay K. Nepal

Environmental Management

DOI 10.1007/s00267-011-9778-1

Here is an interesting paper that looks at people's attitudes towards parks, wildlife tourism and park management. The paper offers interesting insights to improving conservation and park management policies.

The researchers say overall, local residents value the existence of Protected Areas despite incurring losses from crop and property damage and livestock predation. However the attitudes of the locals to towards PA staff pose a major challenge to implementing conservation strategies.

Another interesting observation is that local residents generally perceived little benefit from the rapidly growing wildlife tourism in PAs. Top-down management efforts that assume the same factors are relevant across all PAs are likely to be less successful than management efforts tailored to individual places.

On the whole this is a very interesting paper. Recommended reading for wildlife managers.

I thank Dr Ullas Karanth for being gracious enough to send me a copy of the paper