People’s perceptions of protected areas across spatial scales

The relationships that local communities have with protected areas are important for the success of these areas. However, it is difficult to capture park-people relationships at spatial scales that make them useful for conservation management and planning. To explore the role of scale in people's perceptions of protected areas, we examined the relative contribution of factors at different levels (i.e. village, protected area, country) to people's attitudes and perceptions of protected areas. Based on 3,573 individual surveys from 140 villages around three protected areas in Nepal and four in Myanmar, we found patterns indicating that people's negative perceptions were influenced by factors at the village and protected area levels. In contrast, positive perceptions, such as an appreciation of conservation and ecosystem service benefits and recreational benefits were influenced by factors at the national level. Our results suggest that a multilevel approach can improve the understanding of park-people relationships and contribute to better planning and management, thereby improving park-people relationships. For example, positive perceptions may be fostered with interventions at the national level, such as national media campaigns or national educational curricula, while negative perceptions may be most effectively mitigated through interventions targeted at specific villages and conflicts.