A Review of Public Participation in the Affairs of Protected Areas in Foreign Countries

Public participation is an attempt by development partners to broadly consult and involve the public as to where projects should be situated. As bottom-up management, it is also a management strategy to increase public enthusiasm and initiative, which has become a key concept and common practice for management of protected areas across the world. So research on public participation has been a focus in the field of protected area governance. Based on the relevant academic publications collected from the Web of Science database, this paper synthesizes the research origins, profiles, contents, perspectives and research forecast by using the software Citespace 5. 0. R7 and systematic review methods. First, we investigate the general characteristics of these studies. This research shows that public participation was first introduced as a research topic in protected areas in the end of 20th century, then developed slowly in the early 21st, and the literatures emerged in large numbers after 2009. Most research has been carried out in United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Germany and so on, and these studies show an extension from nature conservation to ecosystem management, environmental change, environmental governance, and stakeholders related to protected areas, demonstrating a development process from a single problem to a multi-dimensional study. And most of the studies used qualitative methods. Second, we analyze the theoretical bases of all the papers and find that theoretical research mainly involves two aspects, one is to introduce other theories into the protected areas, such as stakeholder theory, governance theory, deliberative democracy theory and planned behavior theory; the other is to generalize the ideas embodied in public participation practice in protected areas and form a new theoretical framework. Third, we analyze the actual research content of these papers from four aspects. The first aspect is to analyze the values underlying public participation in protected area affairs. For this aspect, foreign researchers put forward the idea that effective public participation can not only balance the interests between the public and the government to achieve the dual value of the two, but also contribute to the sustainable development of each areas. The second aspect analyzes the limitations and shortcomings in public participation in protected areas. Some studies reveal that public participation can divide stakeholders, making it really difficult for any effective coalition of stakeholders to emerge, leaving out a large barrier-cost, diffuse citizen goodwill and so on. The third aspect is influencing factors of public participation. The fourth aspect is the evaluation of public participation. Fourth, we evaluate the status of international research and find that the papers involve a wide range of objectives. Whether it is the analysis of specific cases or the discussion of basic theories, it begins to deepen and refine, and the research methods tend to be diverse. But there are still some limitations emerged in the current research. In conclusion, the study suggests that future research should pay attention to the following matters: improving the theoretical system of public participation of protected areas and then realizing the universal application of research results, building the overall mechanism of public participation of protected areas; deepening the research methods and practical application research to increase reference, and exploring the paths of public participation of protected areas with Chinese characteristics.