title: Through what mechanisms do protected areas affect environmental and social outcomes?
abstract: To develop effective protected area policies, scholars and practitioners must better understand the mechanisms through which protected areas affect social and environmental outcomes. With strong evidence about mechanisms, the key elements of success can be strengthened, and the key elements of failure can be eliminated or repaired. Unfortunately, empirical evidence about these mechanisms is limited, and little guidance for quantifying them exists. This essay assesses what mechanisms have been hypothesized, what empirical evidence exists for their relative contributions and what advances have been made in the past decade for estimating mechanism causal effects from non-experimental data. The essay concludes with a proposed agenda for building an evidence base about protected area mechanisms.
authors.affiliation: Carey School of Business and Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering, Whiting School of Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA pferraro@jhu.edu.
authors.forename: Paul J
authors.initials: PJ
authors.lastname: Ferraro
authors.affiliation: Economics, Sonoma State University, 1801 E. Cotati Avenue, Stevenson Hall Room 2042, Rohnert Park, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Merlin M
authors.initials: MM
authors.lastname: Hanauer
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D015984:Causality; D003247:Conservation of Natural Resources / Q000379:methods*; D017753:Ecosystem; D006801:Humans; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D011050:Policy Making; D012931:Social Environment
keywords: causal mechanisms; conservation; evaluation; impacts; parks; reserves