Adaptive management in transboundary protected areas: The Bialowieza National Park and Biosphere Reserve as a case study

Transboundary protected areas (PAs) currently represent nearly 10% of the world's network of PAs. The protection of their biological wealth poses special challenges because of the need for cooperation among sovereign states. Adaptive management strategies offer hope for a more accurate assessment of ecological conditions within PAs, and have the potential for furthering one of the major objectives of these PAs, namely enhancing environmental cooperation between countries across whose boundaries the protected area complex is situated. This paper examines the implications of adaptive management for transboundary PAs by using the Polish/Belarusian Bialowieza PAs as a case study. Managers of PAs have conventionally aimed at accurate predictions and short-term system equilibrium through 'top-down' policies of control and exclusion. In the case of PAs, these objectives have meant limiting use and employing models of linear growth. Adaptive management strategies rely instead on long-term experience, assessment of experimental interventions, and collection of greater amounts of information to assess future outcomes. They aim at the satisfaction of objectives that may include equilibrium changes. These features of adaptive management imply attention over time to the interactions between different key species, greater involvement of local populations in the collection of information about the resources, and experimenting with different levels of use to infer the most suitable protection strategies.