Good fences make good neighbors: the Area de Conservación Guanacaste, Costa Rica.

Abstract

The 153,000 ha Area de Conservación Guanacaste and World Heritage Site in northwestern Costa Rica is place-based restoration and conservation of a tropical dry forest ecosystem and its adjacent ecosystems through its integration with local, national and international society.! Fifteen years and $45 million have generated substantial progress down this path. There have been no new wheels to discover but success has required single-minded attention to the goal. The classical national park structure that gave us the raw biological materials to work with in 1986 requires substantial modification to survive in todays' world of privatization, decentralization, global markets, and technical feasibilities.! Restoration is easy - stop the assault and let nature do its thing.! Multi-faceted integration and self-sufficiency have required much more effort.! Perhaps the largest impediments are that national society has a tendency to want to manipulate the conserved area to its own ends rather than let it be what it is meant to be, and international society continually changes the rules of the game and the structure of the playing field.