A Study of the Mechanism of Community Participation in Resilient Governance of National Parks: With Wuyishan National Park as a Case

Shuiguang Chen, Xiaoxia Sun and Shipeng Su
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Shuiguang Chen: School of Public Administration, Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, Fuzhou 350002, China
Xiaoxia Sun: School of Life Sciences, Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, Fuzhou 350002, China
Shipeng Su: School of Public Administration, Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, Fuzhou 350002, China

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 18, 1-16

Abstract: A community can serve as a force that pushes national parks to realize sustainable development, while community participation is critical to the relationship between national park protection and community development. Therefore, the present study explored the community’s participation in the construction of Wuyishan National Park (hereinafter referred to as the Park) by means of case analysis and qualitative research. The research outcomes showed that the community’s participation was led by the authorities, which is a typical example of “passive participation”. In addition, the governing body of the Park and its communities did not form a sound organization that enabled them to manage and protect the Park in concerted efforts. In other words, they did not work well together, and had not yet established an effective community participation mechanism. Moreover, there were three major problems about the community’s participation in the Park’s governance: The community lacked the ability to take part in it, its participation took limited forms, and it displayed little initiative in the participation. To solve these problems, the present research proposes four mechanisms to improve community participation regarding technological, structural, social, and institutional resilience, i.e., intelligent guidance mechanism, nested organization mechanism, social mobilization mechanism, and institutional guarantee mechanism, respectively.

Keywords: resilient governance; community participation mechanism; Wuyishan National Park (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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