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.