Marhawati Mappatoba

Co-management of Protected Areas: Strategy to Balance the Goal of Conservation and the Goal of the Local Livelihoods Marhawati Mappatoba

The lost of biological diversity, especially in tropical countries is a major global challenge of our time. The establishment of protected areas remains to be the most important policy instrument to deal with this challenge. However, the conventional state-based approaches to manage protected areas have often failed to balance the goal of nature conservation with the goal of improving the livelihood of the local communities. A promising approach to deal with this problem is the concept of co-management (collaborative management), which envisages a joint management of protected areas by both state agencies and local communities. An interesting work on ?Community Agreement on Nature Conservation in the Lore Lindu Nationbal Park, Indonesia have a considerable potential for dealing with conflicting interests of diverse stakeholders concerning protected area management. As such agreements are locally negotiated; they can take the specific ecological, socio-economic and cultural conditions at the local level into account. Co-management makes a major contribution to the analytical literature on natural resource and anyone else who may be considering a negotiation for marketing efforts.