Evaluation of management effectiveness of protected areas in the Volta Basin, Ghana: perspectives on the methodology for evaluation, protected area financing and community participation

ABSTRACT

Protected areas are widely recognized as an important strategy for biodiversity conservation. Most of the sites are, however, poorly managed as resource exploitation by fringe communities and low government funding, among other things, threaten their management effectiveness. We used the World Commission on Protected Areas framework for designing management effectiveness evaluation systems, with the Rapid Assessment and Prioritization of Protected Areas Management (RAPPAM) methodology as a tool, to evaluate six components of the management cycle at six sites in Ghana for their management effectiveness. We examined the robustness of RAPPAM as an evaluation tool in the African context. The results showed that most of the sites evaluated are vulnerable and exposed to various degrees of pressure and threats, including poverty in the nearby communities, adjacent land-use and encroachment. On RAPPAM, we noted that apart from inconsistencies in some of the assessment scores due to the biases associated with the self-assessment approach of the methodology, the management effectiveness framework places little emphasis on financing and community participation, though both play major roles in the management process. We proposed a modification of the framework within the African context, to address effectively the underlying courses of pressure and threats facing Ghana’s protected areas.

KEYWORDS:

• Protected areas
• management effectiveness evaluation
• community participation
• financing
• Volta Basin
• Ghana

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Jesse S. Ayivor is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Environment and Sanitation Studies, University of Ghana. His major research interests are in social dimensions of wildlife protected area management, social and environmental impacts of artisanal small-scale mining, climate change adaptation and policy, and land use and land cover change analysis.

Prof. Chris Gordon is an environmental scientist, with a special interest in biodiversity of coastal, wetlands, freshwater systems and the functioning of such systems in the face of climate change. He was the founding Director of the Institute for Environment and Sanitation Studies of the University of Ghana and has provided policy guidance on climate change, aquatic resources and their management as well as wetland and biodiversity conservation issues to government and non-governmental organizations. He currently serves on the UNEnvironment World Adaptation Science Programme Scientific Committee, on the Earth Commission of Future Earth and is the convenor of the ISO panel to revise ISO 14015 Standard on Environmental Due Diligence.

Graham A. Tobin is an Emeritus Professor at the University of South Florida in the School of Geosciences. His research focuses on the human dimensions of natural hazards and water resources. He has held various professional academic and administrative positions at the University, including Vice Provost and Chair of the Department of Geography.

Yaa Ntiamoa-Baidu is a Professor of Zoology at the University of Ghana, Chair of the Centre for African Wetlands, a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences and Birdlife International’s Vice-President for Africa. Her extensive experience in biodiversity and environmental conservation and research spans across practical field work as a Warden in the Ghana Wildlife Department, through training and capacity development as a university lecturer, to international conservation policy and advocacy as Director of WWF International Africa and Madagascar Programme. Her current research interests are wetlands and waterbird ecology, biodiversity conservation and development.