Conservation has no shortage of ambitious policy. Marine protected areas now cover roughly 8% of the world’s oceans. Protected lands account for nearly a fifth of the planet’s terrestrial surface. Community forest concessions span millions of hectares across the tropics. On paper, the progress is striking.
Yet conservationists have long warned about “paper parks”: protected areas that exist in law but not in practice. After the legislation passes, boundaries are gazetted and rules changed, but the wildlife, fish and forests do not recover because the human behavior those rules depend on never shift. Paper parks illustrate something conservationists have learned the hard way: structural reform is necessary, but rarely sufficient. Structural reform sets the rules, but behavioral dynamics determine whether those rules become a functioning system — or a paper park.
