Unpacking equity for protected area conservation
There have been numerous calls to ensure that protected areas are governed and managed in an equitable manner. While there has been progress on assessing management effectiveness, there has been less headway on defining the equitable part of the equation. Here we propose a framework for advancing equity in the context of protected area conservation that was developed through a process of expert workshops and consultation and then validated at three sites in East Africa. We go on to present the case for shifting the framing of protected area conservation from a livelihoods framing to an equity framing, show how equity relates to a number of other key concepts and related assessment tools in protected area conservation, before outlining a step-wise process for using the framework to advance equity in protected area conservation.