Networking on Networked Governance

Dr. Terence Hay-Edie, UNEP-GEF-Small Grants Programme and WCPA Governance Specialist Group

Dr. Ray Sauvajot, Associate Director for Natural Resource Stewardship and Science, US National Park Service

Dr. Gary Tabor, Executive Director, Center for Large Landscape Conservation

I organized a session on networked governance in conservation at the Protected Planet Pavilion that was well-attended.
Climate change, habitat fragmentation and globalization require that conservation work at ever-larger scales. As we “scale up” to system-level planning and connectivity conservation, we must complement a focus on site-level management to accommodate and even embrace a multiplicity of ownerships and interests across landscapes of diverse and competing land uses. Our current treatment attempts to understand governance of protected areas of such landscapes by delineating four basic types (government, shared, private and indigenous/conserved). But in practice this typology can appear to introduce division whereas large-scale conservation requires integration.
We concluded that networked governance merits further study by the World Commission on Protected Areas, not that a global institution would have a direct role in networks that best evolve internally and organically, but so that multi-laterals not act in ways counter to effective networks.