Themes in Objectives of Bolivian Protected Area Management Across Governance Levels
Category: Research Poster
Author(s): Avery Gebhart, Abbigail Darnell
Presenter(s): Avery Gebhart
Mentors(s): Claudia Baudoin Farah
Protected Areas (PAs) are central to global environmental conservation efforts. These diverse areas have many different types of governance structures, practices, and conservation priorities that influence political and sociocultural outcomes. Bolivia offers a unique case for analysis due to its biocultural diversity, extensive PA network, array of management types, and historic inclusion of Indigenous peoples in PA management. Despite the existence of public information on Bolivian PAs and their objectives, little research has been done to examine how conservation objectives differ across management levels and over time. Using textual data from Bolivia’s 2024 national and subnational protected areas atlases, we created a database as the groundwork for our interpretive analysis of the language and priorities of objectives to determine how they differ across varying governance levels, geographic regions, and time. Our results identified previously unrecorded patterns in the priorities of PA management, providing a foundation for future research. We recommend future research expands on these interpretations by incorporating empirical data representative of Indigenous livelihoods and lived experiences.