Outsourcing Nature Conservation in Africa | Mirage News

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — There is an experiment underway in conservation in Africa. With biodiversity at risk and countries facing financial and political crises, some governments are turning over management of protected areas to private, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

This strategy appears to be paying off. NGOs can better control corruption, making them attractive to large donors like the World Bank and the European Union. Their capital can fund staff, research, and technology to manage protected areas and species more effectively. Although these management changes appear to work anecdotally, few, if any, studies have rigorously evaluated the results.

A team of researchers from institutions like UC Santa Barbara wanted to know how this trend is affecting wildlife and people. They examined privately and publicly managed parks across the continent and found that NGO management improves wildlife interventions, including reducing elephant poaching, and increases tourism. Overall, management appears to improve under NGO control. However, they also found that in landscapes experiencing armed conflict, outsourcing park management also increases the risk of armed groups attacking civilians in and around protected areas. The team published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Protected areas, and conservation in general, do not exist in isolation from people,” said lead author Sean Denny, a doctoral student at UC Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management. “In fact, conservation is fundamentally about people — it’s about finding ways for people and other species to coexist. This includes preventing extinctions caused by human activities like hunting and deforestation.” As a result, conservation often impacts people’s lives and livelihoods, outcomes that must be taken into account.

African parks as a case study

Denny and his two co-authors focused on the organization African Parks (AP) as a case study. AP is the largest NGO that works with governments in Africa to manage protected areas. The South African non-profit organization is given full authority to manage, staff and finance the parks.

AP’s primary mission is to conserve and restore wildlife populations in Africa, but they also seek to make protected areas benefit people through tourism and development projects, such as building schools and hospitals for local communities. Because of their focus on restoration, they sometimes work in areas of armed conflict, where wildlife is particularly susceptible to overhunting and faces extreme hunting pressure. However, protecting wildlife in these landscapes can require high levels of security and enforcement, which can have unintended consequences for people and result in trade-offs between conservation and human well-being. The authors were interested in exploring these trade-offs; and because AP operates in conflict zones, they suspected that AP’s activities might trap them.

But conducting a study on such a large scale presented a challenge: The authors had to compare outcomes in areas under AP’s control with what would have happened if AP had never been given the reins. To do this, they conducted a quasi-experiment in which researchers used real-world events to create treatment and control groups. In real experiments, researchers randomly assign subjects to one of these groups to ensure that their findings were due to the treatment and not simply to prior differences. But Denny and company didn’t have that luxury.

Fortunately, AP has published a map of protected areas in Africa that they believe are essential to protecting the continent’s biodiversity and ultimately meet their criteria for future management. These “anchorages” share key characteristics such as large size, strong legal status, limited agricultural activity, and the potential to support large wildlife populations. Twenty-two of these anchorages are already managed by AP, but the rest are managed by governments and, in a few cases, other NGOs.

The research team created a treatment group of anchorages that AP already manages. Their control group consisted of anchorages that were not managed by AP or any other NGO. “African Parks essentially created our control group for us,” Denny said.

Deciding what to look for

The team used a variety of metrics to measure the impacts of private management on wildlife and people. They needed metrics for which data were available at continental scales. For wildlife, they focused on elephant poaching and bird abundance. For the human side, they looked at tourism, affluence, and armed conflict. To measure these outcomes, they used a variety of datasets and platforms, including a dataset called MIKE, which monitors elephant poaching; the citizen science platforms eBird and iNaturalist; Atlas AI, which measures affluence; and the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, which measures incidents of armed conflict.

The researchers also used the Management Effectiveness Tracking Tool (METT) to look under the hood at how AP influences management practices themselves. This standardized questionnaire, developed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, quantifies how well protected areas are managed. It reports data on planning, funding, law enforcement, and stakeholder engagement. The METT can shed light on the mechanisms behind the results observed in the other datasets.

Based on the results

Denny and his coauthors were impressed by the results that private management had for wildlife. It reduced elephant poaching by 35 percent and increased bird populations by 37 percent. “African Parks really seems to be working for wildlife,” Denny said. “The fact that they can reduce elephant poaching in protected areas that are threatened by armed groups is really quite remarkable.” NGO management also increased tourism, but the effects on welfare were less significant.

However, the authors also found some important drawbacks. In areas where armed conflict is already underway, these changes could increase the likelihood that armed groups will attack civilians living in areas adjacent to those under AP control. They believe this could be the result of armed groups redirecting their activities to exploiting civilians when AP prevents them from operating in or extracting resources from protected areas.

“While the impacts on wildlife were even better than we expected,” Denny said, “we were concerned about the impacts of the conflict, especially when combined with the potential for reduced inclusiveness in decision-making that comes with private management.”

A look under the hood

The Management Effectiveness Tracking Tool provided insight into the mechanisms behind these outcomes. African Parks is a behemoth compared to many cash-strapped national governments. METT results showed that AP increased capacity and resources (in terms of budget and staff), as well as design and planning. “In some management criteria, they really do seem to be managing more effectively,” Denny said.

The authors also found that surveillance and enforcement within parks increased under AP. The organization uses sophisticated equipment—such as aircraft, drones, and remote sensing—to monitor illegal activities in its parks and enforce wildlife protections. This likely contributes to the benefits of AP management for wildlife, as well as increasing the likelihood that armed groups will target civilians.

Interestingly, only one of the four categories the METT measured appeared to fall under private park management: inclusiveness of decision-making. The slight drop in this category did not surprise Denny and his colleagues, given that AP maintains tight control over its work. However, it does point to an opportunity for improvement.

Manage more effectively

African wildlife is under threat, and NGOs offer a possible solution. But it is crucial to examine the impact of private management of conservation to understand its strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for improvement. Outsourcing conservation appears to offer a way to protect wildlife, but the associated increased enforcement can lead to problems for people.

According to the researchers, one way to make protected areas work for people is to involve local communities in management. According to Denny, ethical protection requires that local communities are compensated for the costs they bear and that they are involved in policy decisions.

“When citizens in conflict zones are bearing unexpected costs for the management of private protected areas, it is especially important that they are involved in decision-making,” he said. Another way is to ensure that conservationists, park managers and governments monitor the impact of private management, not only on wildlife but also on people, and adapt when necessary.

Furthermore, many national parks in Africa were created by colonial administrations, so they have deep colonial histories and legacies. Denny and his co-authors are keen to collaborate with African researchers to explore how this history shapes local people’s perceptions of parks, and their preferences for how they are managed and by whom. “By elevating local voices, perspectives, and experiences, we can develop more meaningful research and support management practices that benefit both wildlife and local communities,” he said.