The last three decades have witnessed a fundamental paradigm shift in protected area management. For many years biodiversity conservation seemed incompatible with resource utilisation by the local population. Communities were evicted from the newly created parks, their livelihoods were disrupted and they fell into poverty. Since the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, protected area management has followed the ideas of co-management and community participation. The livelihoods of the people living in and around protected areas are considered equally important as nature conservation.
However, the reconciliation of biodiversity conservation and livelihood needs has not always been successful. In this volume, regional planners, researchers and management experts from Nepal, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam and Germany share their experiences from different perspectives. Each case has a very specific ecological, institutional, socio-cultural and economic setting. This leads to two of the most important lessons that can be derived from the cases: Best practice examples and lessons learnt need to be contextualized in order to be successful and the dialogue between stakeholders and people's participation are always key to a successful co-management.