Coordinating community resource use and conservation: An institutional diagnostic practice in the Wuyishan National Park

Maintaining community resource use and securing ecosystem services for the public is a major issue in protected area management. This research developed an institutional diagnostic tool for community resource use based on the theories of “Common-Pool Resources”, “Environment Entitlement” and “Socio-ecological System”. This tool is maturing and tested in the Wuyishan National Park through a knowledge co-production process of communities' narratives and researchers' observations. It was used to identify key institutional factors that affect communities' ecosystem management, facilitate a negotiation procedure that can motivate communities’ acceptance of new rules and participation in conservation, and provide policy entry points for sustaining both the ecosystem and rural livelihoods. Results show that key factors affecting resource accessibility mainly include land policy at the macro scale, protected area planning and management at the meso-scale, and the internalising of modern regulations and technologies with historical inheritance at the micro-scale. Key institutions affecting access to ecosystem services and well-being include mainly the formal institutions such as the market and credit system at the meso-scale, and informal institutions expressed by collective actions at the micro-scale. Results also indicate that local people mainly cared about the procedural legitimacy and their environmental autonomy for negotiation in the multi-stakeholder context. They required a reasonable and clear definition of resource use regulation, and low risks to join in a negotiation. By integrating the key institutions and negotiation demands, we provided the policy entry point to facilitate the institutional change in Wuyishan National Park. This diagnostic tool is proved applicable in the way of knowledge co-production, and it is promising to help formulate context-specific conservation policies to facilitate the community to participate in the construction and management of protected areas for win-win outcomes of the natural ecosystem and community welfare.