Good Governance of tourism in protected areas: the case of Yazd Game ranches

Governance of protected areas has been changed dramatically to overcome the lack of state budget. Moreover, such changes have occurred to facilitate the partnership and involvement of local communities. Game ranches, as one of the conservation means, have been growing rapidly due to such needs and changes. Tourism is the only way of earning income for most of these areas. Regarding to this new approach of biodiversity conservation, Department of Environment of Iran (DOE) has established number of game ranches in three provinces of Iran for the first time. Among all of them, Yazd province belongs the most number of pilot game ranches. Since game ranching is an extremely new phenomenon in Iran, the main question of this research is “what are the most appropriate types of governance for game ranches of Iran?” to answer this question we introduced different types of governance in protected areas which are well known internationally. Furthermore, via identifying good governance principals we are going to measure the effectiveness of governance in Yazd’s game ranches.
This study has assessed the good governance principles in two game ranches in Yazd. The participants of this research were local communities, managers and staff of the game ranches and also experts of Department of Environment of Yazd. The findings show that regarding to the existing law and regulations and also human system and eco-system of Yazd, the most appropriate type of governance is the collaborative type between private sector and local community. But based on the participants’ answers there are two main important problems: (1) the lack of strategic plan to facilitate the participation of local stakeholders and (2) delays in licensing the operation of consumptive wildlife tourism within the game ranches from DOE. Both problems seem to have negative impacts on effectiveness of collaborative governance of the game ranches.