ABSTRACT
Environmental issues associated with geopolitical borders include biodiversity reduction, ecosystem fragmentation, and the destruction of habitat through human construction, road services, and military operations in border areas. Ecosystems divided by man-made boundaries can be influenced by many different policies, legal and institutional structures, management and governance regimes, and various social, cultural, and economic systems, as well as by complex relations between countries. To overcome these differences, transboundary conservation is intended to encourage cooperative work across international frontiers to achieve shared conservation goals. The unrestrained nature of ecosystems encourages the development of transboundary protected areas. Conservation across borders manifests in several different ways and results in a number of institutional entities, including transboundary protected areas (TBPAs), transfrontier conservation areas, transfrontier parks, and peace parks. The authors detail the terminology related to conservation areas that straddle two or more international borders and describes and analyzes two major aspects of TBPAs and tourism: borderland nature and community-based tourism, as well as the geopolitical context vis-à-vis the peace park function. The authors also present the development of the TBPA concept over time.
