This review examines the social, economic, and political effects of environmental conservation projects as they are manifested in protected areas. We pay special attention to people living in and displaced from protected areas, analyze the worldwide growth of protected areas over the past 20 years, and offer suggestions for future research trajectories in anthropology. We examine protected areas as a way of seeing, understanding, and producing nature (environment) and culture (society) and as a way of attempting to manage and control the relationship between the two. We focus on social, economic, scientific, and political changes in places where there are protected areas and in the urban centers that control these areas. We also examine violence, conflict, power relations, and governmentality as they are connected to the processes of protection. Finally, we examine discourse and its effects and argue that anthropology needs to move beyond the current examinations of language and power to attend to the ways in which protected areas produce space, place, and peoples.

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Parks and Peoples: The Social Impact of Protected Areas

Overview of integrative tools and methods in assessing ecological integrity in estuarine and coastal systems worldwide.

We analyze the strategies and actions that enable transitions toward ecosystem-based management using the recent governance changes of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park as a case study. The interplay among individual actors, organizations, and institutions at multiple levels is central in such transitions. A flexible organization, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, was crucial in initiating the transition to ecosystem-based management. This agency was also instrumental in the subsequent transformation of the governance regime and provided leadership throughout the process. Strategies involved internal reorganization and management innovation, leading to an ability to coordinate the scientific community, to increase public awareness of environmental issues and problems, to involve a broader set of stakeholders, and to maneuver the political system for support at critical times. The transformation process was induced by increased pressure on the Great Barrier Reef (from terrestrial runoff, overharvesting, and global warming) that triggered a new sense of urgency to address these challenges. The focus of governance shifted from protection of selected individual reefs to stewardship of the larger-scale seascape. The study emphasizes the significance of stewardship that can change patterns of interactions among key actors and allow for new forms of management and governance to emerge in response to environmental change. This example illustrates that enabling legislations or other social bounds are essential, but not sufficient for shifting governance toward adaptive comanagement of complex marine ecosystems.

https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/105/28/9489.full.pdf

Navigating the transition to ecosystem-based management of the Great Barrier Reef, Australia

One of the remarkable transformations of the conservation community in recent years has been the proliferation of sociocultural anthropologists in and around protected areas and in conservation meetings and organizations. Anthropologists have been increasingly involved in institutions such as the World Conservation Union (IUCN) and the Society for Conservation Biology’s Social Science Working Group. This change reflects an increase in the extent of protected areas, their tendency to be located in remote rural areas where anthropologists have traditionally conducted long-term ethnographic field research, and academic and theoretical changes within anthropology, with its increasing interest on globalization, environmentalism, and political ecology. This proliferation has had a mixed reception. Some believe it results in work that is eccentric at best or that dangerously diverts resources (and journal space); others believe it is an essential move. Anthropologists’ interests may seem tangential (or opaque) to the practical work of saving nature. But we see protected areas not just as sites rich in biological diversity but also as rich sites of social interactions and social reproduction. By social reproduction we mean the maintenance and replication of social practices, beliefs, and institutions that would have been considered “culture” in anthropology in the past. We also see protected areas as sites that work to both meet conservation goals and restructure how people understand, use, and interact with their surroundings (P.W., J. Igoe, & D.B., unpublished). As such, protected areas affect people living within and adjacent to them and people displaced by them. They also affect the lives of people working for the agencies, governmental and nongovernmental, who create them and manage them.

An Anthropological Perspective on Some Unexpected Consequences of Protected Areas

Changes from coral to macroalgal dominance following disturbances to corals symbolize the global degradation of coral reefs. The development of effective conservation measures depends on understanding the causes of such phase shifts. The prevailing view that coral–macroalgal phase shifts commonly occur due to insufficient grazing by fishes is based on correlation with overfishing and inferences from models and small-scale experiments rather than on long-term quantitative field studies of fish communities at affected and resilient sites. Consequently, the specific characteristics of herbivorous fish communities that most promote reef resilience under natural conditions are not known, though this information is critical for identifying vulnerable ecosystems. In this study, 11 years of field surveys recorded the development of the most persistent coral–macroalgal phase shift (>7 years) yet observed on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef (GBR). This shift followed extensive coral mortality caused by thermal stress (coral bleaching) and damaging storms. Comparisons with two similar reefs that suffered similar disturbances but recovered relatively rapidly demonstrated that the phase shift occurred despite high abundances of one herbivore functional group (scraping/excavating parrotfishes: Labridae). However, the shift was strongly associated with low fish herbivore diversity and low abundances of algal browsers (predominantly Siganidae) and grazers/detritivores (Acanthuridae), suggesting that one or more of these factors underpin reef resilience and so deserve particular protection. Herbivorous fishes are not harvested on the GBR, and the phase shift was not enhanced by unusually high nutrient levels. This shows that unexploited populations of herbivorous fishes cannot ensure reef resilience even under benign conditions and suggests that reefs could lose resilience under relatively low fishing pressure. Predictions of more severe and widespread coral mortality due to global climate change emphasize the need for more effective identification and protection of ecosystem components that are critical for the prevention of coral reef phase shifts.

Coral-macroalgal phase shifts or reef resilience: links with diversity and functional roles of herbivorous fishes on the Great Barrier Reef

Kakadu National Park is treasured by millions of Australians as a conservation icon. This work covers the story of Aboriginal involvement in its management, and offers an account of the social and political history of the establishment and development of Kakadu National Park, and includes an approach which contributes to the debate on controversial topics such as Aboriginal land rights, uranium mining and joint management of national parks. The management of Kakadu originally focused on the conservation of nature and natural resources. This has now evolved to a more balanced focus on the conservation of both its natural and cultural heritage.

David Lawrence

Papers

Kakadu: The Making of a National Park

The Naturalist and his ?Beautiful Islands?: Charles Morris Woodford in the Western Pacific

Customary exchange across Torres Strait

The Great Barrier Reef: Finding the Right Balance

Gunnar Landtman in Papua: 1910 to 1912