An Outcome-Oriented, Social–Ecological Framework for Assessing Protected Area Effectiveness

Both the number and the extent of protected areas have grown considerably in recent years, but evaluations of their effectiveness remain partial and are hard to compare across cases. To overcome this situation, first, we suggest reserving the term effectiveness solely for assessing protected area outcomes, to clearly distinguish this from management assessments (e.g., sound planning). Second, we propose a multidimensional conceptual framework,...