There is broad consensus that the ecological-social landscapes for government-designated protected areas should comprise core areas and their surrounding buffer zones and that the essential tasks for managing these landscapes should comprise: (i) ecological research and monitoring, (ii) law enforcement, (iii) community outreach and awareness raising, (iv) community livelihoods development and engagement with community managed lands, (v) ecotourism, and (vi) habitat management. This paper proposes that these tasks should not necessarily be undertaken by the protected area agency alone. Instead, it recommends investigation into the development of protected area management working groups in the different fields of management, whereby these networks create institutional linkages between the grassroots communities, other local stakeholders and a protected area co-management committee. The paper draws from the authors' experiences and briefly describes models for such local networks already being implemented in northern Vietnam and Laos for protected areas with high biodiversity values. While many of the approaches described are still too young to draw conclusive evidence of their efficacy, their implementation demonstrates that local interest for innovative approaches to co-management can be generated.

This paper examines the multi-level collaborative governance system in Hin Nam No National Protected Area in central Lao PDR. The paper assesses the governance and management system's potential as an exemplar to protected areas practitioners, and discusses how such a system might be initiated and replicated elsewhere in the country and the region. Five building blocks of an experimental collaborative governance model are described. These comprise: (i) a participatory governance assessment; (ii) establishing a multi-level collaborative management and governance structure; (iii) participatory zonation based on traditional knowledge and customary rights; (iv) drafting collaborative governance agreements and (v) involving local people as additional protected area management manpower. The inter-linkages between these building blocks are also described. The first results of the collaborative governance approach are encouraging as the total management effectiveness score increased by 13 per cent in two years. It shows that the collaborative governance model can deliver positive results for the entire protected area system in Lao PDR, which is often referred to as a 'paper park system'. Further work on adaptive management of the collaborative governance system and sustainable financing of the technical field programmes will be required to sustain this model.

Thailand has the best protected-area system in South East Asia, comprising 74 national parks and 34 wildlife sanctuaries. However, the integrity of these sites is far from assured: some are ‘paper parks’, which are being subjected to increasing human pressure. One site, Khao Sam Roi Yot National Park, has suffered some of the most extreme degradation.

Co-management is a developing field of protected area management. Increasingly, the practice is to involve local communities and other stakeholders in protected area planning and management. In many countries, management boards, co-management structures and other participatory mechanisms are being created. This paper reports on promoting co-management involving participatory management planning at Kuiburi National Park, Central Thailand, through the establishment of two working groups, namely a core management planning team comprising park personnel (charged with plan implementation), operating in parallel with a park management board working group (local people and other stakeholders). These institutional bodies participated in a park management planning process, which was fuelled by socioeconomic data focusing on the high profile human-elephant conflict in the buffer zone. The initiative led to a major rethink on participatory management planning by the Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation. The process also led to some valuable recommendations for elephant-wildlife mitigation, both at Kuiburi and the international context.

There are few cases where institutional mappings of multi-level arrangements for collaborative management have been conducted. If at all documented, these experiences remain unevaluated. Periyar Tiger Reserve in the Southern Western Ghats is a well-resourced government-managed protected area that extends management interventions into the buffer zone. It has been designated as a Learning Centre of Excellence by the Government of India, and recognized internationally for effective management. This paper analyses the institutional arrangements of this reserve at different levels, from the landscape level to the individual village. The analysis reveals that a multi-stakeholder collaborative management body appears to be important to supervise landscape protected area management. The establishment of the Periyar Foundation, a dynamic Government-Organized Non-Government Organization (GONGO), is particularly innovative to facilitate flexible management responses, which has been replicated nationwide through the National Tiger Conservation Authority. The protected area management tasks are well-defined, with protected area management working groups established for four key fields of management, increasing constructive engagement with all priority stakeholders. However, the representation of protected area working group spokespersons on the landscape collaborative management body seems to be weak. These specialized working groups engage the 72 villages, 5,584 households and 28,000 villagers, through 76 ecodevelopment committees. Institutional mapping of multi-level collaborative management shows promise for further investigation in landscape protected area management.