Theses and Dissertations Collection

Understanding the relationship between transboundary conservation designation and effectiveness is fundamental to assess the theoretical assumptions around how drivers of land cover and land use change (LCLUC) affect these conservation approaches at regional and sub-regional scales. This dissertation explores opportunities and challenges of national and transboundary protected areas (PA) within a transboundary region. This work focuses on PAs created between 1986 and 2016 in the Trifinio Region, Central America, which spans Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. There are three chapters. The first chapter uses mixed methods to explore how key elements of governance processes related to decentralization in decision-making, management capacity, and management category contribute to achieving conservation objectives of PAs. Chapter two presents a rigorous evaluation of the impact of PA governance on LCLUC outcomes using remote sensing and econometric analysis. It examines how impact changes across 15 PAs by level of restriction, levels of decentralization, and management capacity. The last chapter analyzes the impact of transboundary protection on LCLUC outcomes by comparing PAs across countries in Trifinio and by comparing PAs inside the transboundary area to those just outside Trifinio. This dissertation highlights the complex relationship between governance components such as decentralization, management capacity, and management restrictions and informs local conservation policy about how governance affects PA outcomes on the ground. In addition, this work sheds light on drivers of change operating within and across countries and contributes to the theory on cross-country and transboundary PA effectiveness and rigorous impact evaluation of PAs.