Equity relates to how fairly a protected area is governed: who has a say in decisions, how decisions are taken, and how the costs and benefits are shared.
At the bottom of this page you can explore results based on the indicators developed by Zafra-Calvo et al (2017) for a sample of protected areas.
If you are familiar with any of these protected areas, and would like to provide an additional perspective on their level of equity, we encourage you to complete this questionnaire (https://goo.gl/forms/V15oXxRBscpjoupy1).
Responses submitted will be managed by the TRECKQUITY project (University of Copenhagen). Results from survey responses will not be immediately displayed on the Protected Planet website, but may be displayed, published or used for analyses in the future.
The scores presented here correspond to the answers provided to ten questions in a multiple-choice questionnaire. Each of these questions was presented with three multiple-choice answers, resulting in a score of 1 (the protected area does not score highly on this indicator: the management does not enhance this aspect of social equity in the protected area), 2 (the protected area has a medium score for this indicator: the management somewhat enhances this aspect of social equity in the protected area) or 3 (the protected area scores highly on this indicator: the management strongly enhances this aspect of social equity in the protected area).
This rapid assessment is designed to be undertaken at the level of individual protected areas. The assessment can act as a starting point in encouraging further discussions around the different elements of social equity. Areas for particular attention could be identified based on lower-scoring elements of equity, or on elements that different stakeholders have divergent opinions on.
Users of the rapid assessment are also strongly encouraged to combine such discussions with more open-ended, long-term participatory processes. These processes could include surveying local stakeholder groups with diverse values, as well as developing a disaggregated analysis of social equity perceptions and views among different stakeholder groups. Such processes can help to inform specific actions to improve social equity in a given protected area.
Select a site below to see the results.
There are several ongoing initiatives investigating how to measure equity in the governance and management of protected areas, including within the IUCN Green List of Protected and Conserved Areas. Such initiatives are needed because existing methods of assessing the quality of protected areas, such as management effectiveness assessments, have been found to sometimes be inadequate for assessing equitable management .
Equity in protected and conserved areas can be understood as a combination of three interlinked elements:
Recognition equity relates to acknowledgement and respect for stakeholders, as well as their social and cultural diversity, and their values, rights and beliefs. Procedural equity relates to how decisions about the protected area are made, and the extent to which stakeholders are able to participate. Distributive equity is associated with the distribution of benefits and burdens.
As of 2024, records of site-level assessments of governance quality and equity such as SAGE, GAPA and SAPA are included in GD-PAME alongside PAME assessments. Please see the Management Effectiveness (PAME) section for further details.
Tracking progress towards global targets for protected and conserved areas.