ABSTRACT
Negotiated agreements between local communities and state agencies concerning the management of natural resources have gained increasing importance in recent years. Examples include negotiations on water rights (Bruns and Meinzen-Dick, 2000) and biodiversity conservation (Venema and Breemer, 1999). Negotiation approaches have been identified as a promising strategy to overcome shortcomings of conventional participatory approaches, such as the neglect of power relations and conflicts of interests (Leeuwis, 2000; Agrawal, 2001; Cook and Kothari, 2001; Hildyard and Pandurang, 2001). Protected areas in developing countries are one of the fields where negotiation approaches are particularly promising, because conflicts of interests are frequently observed and conventional strategies of state management have often failed. Negotiation approaches can be used to establish systems of collaborative management (co-management), which involve a sharing of rights and responsibilities between state agencies and the local population. Moreover, negotiated co-management agreements promise to overcome the problems of managing protected areas by state agencies alone, because they are voluntary and have better prospects of taking into account the development aspirations and the indigenous knowledge of the local people living within the surroundings of a protected area (Borrini-Feyerabend et al, 2000; Meinzen-Dick et al, 2001).
