Protected Areas Benefits Assessment Tool + (PA-BAT+): A tool to assess local stakeholder perceptions of the flow of benefits from protected areas

Abstract

Protected areas need to balance a complicated range of practical and ethical issues; the most complicated of all being to balance ethical concerns for the survival of what we might call “wild nature” with ethical concerns for people who live in rich and highly diverse natural habitats. We have long believed that a proper understanding of the full range of values available from natural ecosystems, coupled with strong and varied governance structures and rule of law that ensures at the very least local participation in decision making, can result in protected areas that are good for both people and nature. The development of the tool described in this volume has been led by this belief – and the need to develop a simple way of increasing the understanding of how ecosystem values turn into benefits and how the distribution of these benefits flow from protected areas to stakeholders near and far, working with and based on the experiences and perceptions of local communities. The Protected Areas Benefits Assessment Tool (PA-BAT) was developed initially in 2007 as a means of collecting information for Safety Net: Protected Areas and Poverty Reduction (Dudley et al., 2008), the fourth volume in the WWF and partners’ Arguments for Protection series. The tool aimed to identify some of the wider benefits that protected areas provide to human well-being and thus their contribution to poverty reduction. The idea was to move from an economic- based definition of absolute poverty, such as living on less than US$1 per day as it was defined a decade ago, to a more sophisticated discussion focused on the elements of well- being. The tool was therefore designed with the more holistic definition of ‘well-being’ used to express the boundaries of poverty, based on the frameworks developed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, 2001) and the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID, 1999). The tool was thus based on an interpretation of the five fundamental dimensions of well-being: PA-BAT+ training © Equilibrium Research 9 Subsistence: non-economic benefits that contribute to well-being (e.g. health, nutrition, clean water and shelter) 9 Economic: benefits that provide the ability to earn an income, to consume and to have assets 9 Cultural and spiritual: pride in community, confidence, living culture, spiritual freedom, education 9 Environmental services: role in environmental stability and provision of natural resources 9 Political: relating to issues of governance and thus influence in decision-making processes This first version of the PA-BAT was completed by researchers and practitioners (either protected area or WWF staff) as a desk-based study. The results of this limited implementation suggested that the tool might have wider application. In 2008, a version of the PA-BAT was published, and interest grew in using the tool to gather wider stakeholder input into the assessment of protected areas benefits. Specifically, the tool was used in 2009 by WWF in Turkey in the Küre Mountains National Park (KMNP) and its buffer zone (Bann, 2010; Stolton et al., 2015;). At the time, KMNP had no management plan, but the management had a strong focus on involving local communities in planning related to the national park and buffer zone. Also, protected area staff wanted to better understand the benefits of the park. The opportunity to use the tool in stakeholder meetings led to the development of a totally new method of implementation; the lessons from which, and subsequent applications, are brought together in this publication.