Efetividade dos planos de manejo na gestão de parques estaduais de Minas Gerais

Abstract

Protected areas are fundamental to biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services maintenance, but creation alone does not guarantee their goals achievement. These areas have to be effectively implemented and managed, which depends on adequate planning. However, management plans elaboration and implementation face many difficulties. Thus, it is urgent to identify major bottlenecks in these processes, aiming to orientate appropriate improvement actions. We evaluated management plans effectiveness by in-person interviewing 14 state park managers in Minas Gerais, Brazil. We analyzed its relation to overall protected area management effectiveness and to park relative importance to conservation, and developed a conceptual model to summarize the main bottlenecks identified. Management plans were overall evaluated as highly effective, with an average score of 64.62%. This performance was not related to park management effectiveness (rs=0.251; p=0.387), and its relation to park relative importance to conservation was marginally significant (rs=-0.514; p=0.060). Nevertheless, we found major concerns regarding elaboration delay after protected area creation; inadequate data to orientate management; lack of proposed actions implementation monitoring; insufficient financial, staffing and structural conditions to implement proposals; institutional inconsistencies; conflicts with local people; inadequate staff capacitation. To overcome these issues, we make recommendations such as optimum methods choice to obtain efficient data gathering during management plan elaboration; develop strategic planning based on scenario analysis that support adaptive management; sound investments on staff training and learning capacity development; create a specific fund for protected areas; positive community involvement uplift by implementing truly participatory mechanisms; develop plans interactivity thorough innovative formats. Management plans bring many benefits to protected areas, including knowledge about their attributes and potentials, guidelines to action planning and development, legal and technical support to managers. Hence, we believe investments on planning improvement are more than worthy as it plays a fundamental role on protected areas successful conservation outcome.