Parks, buffer zones, and costly enforcement

The reality of protected area management is that enforcing forest and parkboundaries is costly and so most likely incomplete, due in part to the pressures exerted on the boundaries by local people who often have traditionally relied on the park resources. Buffer zones are increasingly being proposed and implemented to protect both forest resources and livelihoods. Developing a spatially-explicit optimalenforcement model, this paper demonstrates that there is a trade-off between theamount spent on enforcement, the size of a formal buffer zone, and the extent towhich a forest can be protected from illegal extraction. Indeed, given the reality oflimited enforcement budgets, a forest manager with a mandate to protect a wholeforest may in fact end up doing a worse job than one who is able to incorporate anappropriately sized buffer zone into their management plans that, combined with moreeffective enforcement of a smaller exclusion zone, provide the appropriate incentivesfor villagers to extract only in the periphery of the forest, rather than venture further into the forest.