Governance of National Parks influenced by Local Community Participation: China's Potatso National Park

Abstract As a governance strategy, community participation is to implement the coordinated development of communities and protected areas. Therefore, the present study explored the community’s participation in the construction of Potatso National Park by means of a mixed-method approach that is derived from Ostrom’s (2007) socio-ecological systems and IUCN framework, calibrated to local residents’ self-assessments about the outcomes of community engagement on national park governance. From the six dimensions of ecological environment, livelihood assets, high-quality ecological products, management efficiency, social order and satisfaction that characterize the governance outcomes of protected areas, residents' attitudes and views on community participation in national park governance were analyzed. The results show that ecological environment has a positive impact on high-quality ecological products, on the contrary, livelihood assets are not significant; in addition, management efficiency has a significant positive impact on the ecological environment, livelihood assets, high-quality ecological products and social order. We concluded that community participation has a certain direct and indirect effect on the governance outcomes of Potatso National Park. It is suggested to continue to improve the community participation mechanism of residents from the two aspects of residents' subjective psychology and ecological compensation mechanism improvement. The transformation from the tourism development model to the national park is still in the process, and there existing quite a few problems. In the future, it is necessary to further realize the functions of national parks through institutional innovation, community participation capacity building, and the introduction of community institution participation.