What Is the Relationship between Natural Protected Areas and Stakeholders? Based on Literature Analysis from 2000–2021

Abstract

The establishment of natural protected areas (NPAs) is an effective means to deal with the degradation of ecosystems caused by climate change and human activities. The area and number of NPAs in the world have shown an obvious growth trend, and their development has ushered in a new bottleneck. More importantly, the management quality of NPAs should be improved, and the key to improving management quality lies in human beings, but the stakeholder groups involved in NPAs are often overlooked by policymakers. In this study, a quantitative review of the global scientific literature on NPAs stakeholders was conducted using a bibliometric approach. The research hotspots and trends, number, time, and countries were analyzed based on data from published articles. The stakeholder types and internal relationships in NPAs were summarized and mapped. The common problems of resources and community resident management among stakeholders were discussed. A total of 5584 research articles selected from the Web of Science core collection database were used as data sources and were visualized using VOSviewer and the Biblioshiny program in the R language. The results of the study help to reveal the mutual influence mechanism between stakeholders during the development of nature reserves and contribute to the sustainable development of global protected areas and human well-being.