Julia Gardner
Dovetail Consulting
Ecotrust and the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society-BC (CPAWS) co-hosted the second workshop on First Nations Cooperative Management of Protected Areas in BC on May 30th and 31st 2000 in Vancouver. This was a follow-up workshop to one held in November 1998 on the same topic. The first workshop highlighted some of the challenges with existing cooperative management agreements. The goal of the 2000 workshop was to find ways to make cooperative management arrangements work more successfully.
Using the elements of various arrangements that are working well, workshop participants were asked to discuss a set of principles or possible “best practices” that could guide and improve cooperative management of protected areas in British Columbia. These were set out in a background paper, Best Practices for First Nations Co-operative Management in Protected Areas. The themes were: Authority and Governance, Funding Cooperative Management Arrangements, Management Models and Approaches, Building Capacity Among First Nations, Tourism and other Economic Opportunities for First Nations, Cultural issues, and Interpretation and Partnerships with Non-government and Other Organizations.
This document is the second of two produced from the workshop. The first was a summary of presentations and discussions: First Nations Cooperative Management of Protected Areas: A Summary of Discussions from the May 2000 Workshop (Gardner,2001). This second report is a significantly revised version of the background paper which incorporates the main points raised by workshop participants. While the contents have been reorganized and themes re-combined, all the topics addressed in the background paper are covered.
