Introduction

Natural resources have a limited capacity to sustain use and therefore use needs to be managed (and often restricted) to sustain ecosystem services (e.g. extractive use, tourism, flood control, shoreline protection, etc.). Protected-area management is one management tool that may be applied to manage use. Protected-area management differs from other types of resource-use management, such as catch quota or prohibited fishing gears, in the sense that regulations on use differ between zones within the protected area, and between the protected areas on the one hand and the surrounding area on the other hand.

Deciding on who should have access to resources, and how to regulate access is the core of protected-area management. In this chapter, we show how The Nature Conservancy (TNC), an international organization working in Indonesia, works together with government agencies, NGOs and local communities to manage use in some of the most biodiverse areas on Earth.

As its core approach to conservation, TNC adopted ‘conservation by design’ (The Nature Conservancy 2001), which is in essence a project-management cycle comprising setting priorities, developing strategies, taking action and measuring performance or management impact. The two spatial levels at which this approach is applied are the ecoregion and the site. At the ecoregional level, conservation by design mostly considers spatial patterns in nature at a scale of hundreds to thousands of kilometres to decide where conservation action is needed (Groves et al. 2002).