Measuring the accuracy of management effectiveness evaluations of protected areas.
Evaluating the effectiveness of protected area management to help improve management outcomes is becoming an increasingly common practice. The evaluation tools developed and implemented in over 100 countries generally rely on the expert judgements of protected area managers. Despite the growing collection and use of management effectiveness evaluation data, there have been no previous attempts to measure the accuracy of these data. We measured the accuracy of managers' judgements about the conditions in their reserves by collecting independent field data. We also assessed how accurately the evaluation tool reflected managers' views by conducting semi-structured interviews with 23 protected area managers from New South Wales, Australia. We found that managers made highly accurate judgements of the extent of a common weed species, Rubus fruticosus (blackberry), but often misinterpreted the scope, scale and timeframe of the evaluation. These framing effects can lead to error being introduced into the evaluation dataset, affecting the precision of evaluations such that they cannot be reliably compared among reserves. We suggest that the wording of evaluation questions needs to be explicit about the assessment frame to minimize the influence of framing effects on management effectiveness evaluations.
School of Geography, Planning and Environmental Management, University of Queensland, St Lucia, QLD 4072, Australia; Quantitative and Applied Ecology Group, School of Botany, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC 3010, Australia. Electronic address: carly.cook@monash.edu.
Carly N
CN
Cook
Sustainability Research Centre, University of the Sunshine Coast, Maroochydore DC, QLD 4558, Australia. Electronic address: bcarter@usc.edu.au.
R W Bill
RW
Carter
School of Geography, Planning and Environmental Management, University of Queensland, St Lucia, QLD 4072, Australia. Electronic address: m.hockings@uq.edu.au.
Marc
M
Hockings
D003247:Conservation of Natural Resources; D006801:Humans; D009517:New South Wales; D015397:Program Evaluation; D065856:Rubus
Elicitation; Environmental management; Expert opinion; Practitioner; Uncertainty