A Global Summary of Local Residents' Attitudes toward Protected Areas

One proxy for measuring the prevalence of positive park-people relationships is people's attitudes toward protected areas. In this paper, I summarize 83 studies that capture local communities' attitudes toward 132 protected areas resulting in 117 cases that capture people's attitudes toward protected areas. In 84% of the cases, the majority of respondents had positive attitudes toward the protected area. In 56% of the cases, more than 75% of respondents had positive attitudes toward the protected area. People were most positive toward protected areas in Latin America and Africa, followed by Asia and Europe. Although not significant, people were more positive toward larger, older, less strictly protected, and sub-nationally managed protected areas. The preponderance of positive attitudes suggests that we should not underestimate people's support for protected areas and their potential willingness to participate in conservation efforts.