Evaluation of the Impact of Policymakers' Decisions in the Management Capacity of Protected Areas: Efficiency Evidence from Five Countries.

Protected areas play an important role in biodiversity conservation and tourism. Significant efforts have been made to increase the amount of protected lands. A problem of increasing the amount of public protected areas is that governments and other institutions face difficulties in providing the necessary resources for effective management. Accordingly, managers must be as efficient as possible but the lack of comparative methods makes the evaluation of efficiency difficult. Using Data Envelopment Analysis, a non-stochastic and non-parametric approach, information from 29 protected areas in 5 countries was analyzed to compare management efficiency amongst them. The first result found is the level of management efficiency that each park has in comparison with the others parks. The other important result is a prediction of the changes in the outputs if there is a hypothetical budget change. These results allow the generation of information for decision making.