The Power of Trust: Toward a Theory of Local Opposition to Neighboring Protected Areas

This article presents a model based on empirical research for explaining local opposition toward neighboring protected areas. Analyses of data from 420 semistructured interviews with local residents and nearly 1 year of participant observation around three national parks (Great Smoky Mountains National Park, USA, Virgin Islands National Park, U.S. Virgin Islands, and Podocarpus National Park, Ecuador) reveal that common assumptions about local residents as primarily motivated by rational economic stimuli are, at best, incomplete. Rather, the research reveals local distrust for park managers to be the most consistent predictor of active opposition toward neighboring national parks, overshadowing traditional rational assessments of the benefits and disadvantages associated with park presence among other factors. The research compares the relative explanatory power of different pathways leading toward park opposition and examines how perceptions of trustworthiness are developed.