Policy brief for Privately Protected Areas Futures 2017: Supporting the long-term stewardship of privately protected areas

Globally, privately protected areas (PPAs) are an increasingly popular approach to long-term protection of biodiversity on privately owned lands. PPAs provide multiple ecological, social and economic benefits to diverse range of stakeholders in across a range of contexts. These include supporting the desire of landowners to protect conservation values on their land, contributing to national conservation targets, and reducing financial costs of land management to governments. In addition, they provide opportunities to engage landowners to strengthen community social and conservation values through positive partnerships with governments, NGOs, and other groups. This policy brief explores the key drivers of landowner participation in PPA programs (i.e.covenants, easements, servitudes and other long-term agreements with individuals or groups of landowners) and the program mechanisms that maintain successive generations of landowners to be engaged and committed to long-term stewardship. It also considers the challenges faced by PPA programs in developing and maintaining strong collaborative arrangements between the stakeholders involved in these programs.