In view of the 2030 goals of the biodiversity convention, is the governance of protected areas an alternative to traditional political governance?

Abstract

Decisions on the future conformation of the planet and its biosphere will soon have to be made. About 30% of the globe under different categories will be declared a protected area by 2030. Such determination on international level, perhaps unique in its kind due to its territorial scope, will lead to the re-conformation and resignification of enormous spaces. For a century and a half, protected areas have been changing their purposes; it is now necessary to review their governance and the effectiveness of their management, which should not replicate that of unprotected territories. High social and environmental expectations will fall on marginal public institutions within their governments. Many of them dream that these territories will provide alternative models to those offered by traditional governance, projecting non-environmental political utopias and adding complexity. The objective of this work is to evaluate the challenge and lay out criteria to confront it. To this end, demands and feasibility in the case of Argentina are analyzed through two scenarios, estimating the necessary resources and pointing out possible criteria. It is concluded that many priorities must be reformulated in the country and the world to meet a new territoriality since the environmental governance is a good alternative, which is as much in crisis as the traditional one.