THE STAFF MEMBERS at Pico Bonito National Park, on the Caribbean coast of Honduras, have encountered a new kind of disease. It is not a disease associated with the tropical landscape or with the less-than-perfect public water supply.

The disease is an administrative one, a very slow and painful one.

In December 2001, Pico Bonito staff members presented their strategic public use plan to the public for the second time. The evidence of the dangers they faced to get that point could be found under a pile of reports in the library. In 1989 university students and professors had written the park's general management plan, which now lies camouflaged amidst many nondescript documents, never approved, never implemented. Several layers above, a newer plan, the administration's strategic plan, has been laid to rest as well. Written by another consultant, it too suffered a fate worse than misuse.

In fact, many parks across the Latin American landscape have seen their beloved plans succumb to a vector that renders park plans useless. The "disease" displays no prejudice: it strikes strategic plans, interpretation plans, tourism plans, education plans, security plans, financial plans, and of course general management plans. In the late 1990s expert consultants wrote a handful of public use plans for parks in the Dominican Republic, yet most of those plans have disappeared. In Guatemala, the Cerro San Gil Reserve has an ecotourism plan that sites idle. In Honduras La Tigra National Park had both an interpretative plan and a management plan that, like a falling star, glowed bright before disappearing. Even the venerable Galapagos National Park has an interpretation and environmental education plan on the shelf.

In 1999, Pico Bonito's respected director, Gerardo Rodriguez, asked, "Do you know someone who can help us? We have $5,000 from the Angelica Foundation to develop a public use plan." That request to develop a visitor management plan that would eventually lead to an entirely new understanding about the administrative disease plaguing Latin America and an unconventional park planning program designed to cure it.

Pico Bonito Embarks on a Journey
Pico Bonito has involved RARE Center for Tropical Conservation, a non-profit based in Arlington, Virginia, in its public use planning. RARE Center strives to conserve biodiversity by enabling local people to benefit from its preservation. It develops a suite of tools to help parks develop ecotourism.

Because of RARE's successful prior relationship with the park, having provided nature guide training to its staff, RARE staff had earned park staff's confidence enough to be asked to help spend the $5,000 gift from Angelica Foundation.

We offered to research different planning strategies. Unfortunately we could find very few interpretive, educational, ecotourism, or public use plans in Latin American parks to use as models. Of those we did find, many had not been implemented. We began to wonder if RARE Center itself might not be able to do the planning.

Although RARE had skill in participatory planning, its ecotourism program needed a formal public use planning component to tie together its different trainings. So we agreed to be contracted by Pico Bonito/Angelica to help them develop this plan.

"But we have some conditions," we informed Gerardo. "In order to increase the chances that this plan get used, I don't want the traditional consultant path. We can facilitate the planning process for you, but we won't write the plan. You have to do that." Rodriguez seemed agreeable to that. "And there's something else…"

"We would also like an assistant facilitator who can learn the methodology and follow through on the implementation of the plan." The notion of training seemed right to him, so Rodriguez responded, "Okay, Rossel [a key park staff member] will work with you."

Our philosophy at the time was that if you give a park a fish, it will eat for a day, but if you teach it to manage visitors, it will eat for life. What was not part of our philosophy then was that we would learn a far more instructive lesson from Pico Bonito than it would learn from us.

Pico Bonito's First PUP
What Pico Bonito wanted were visitors. Both the park and RARE believed that protected areas could use visitors to benefit conservation. Educational, interpretative, and tourism programs provide a resource stream of earnings as well as voluntary contributions (such as money, time, in-kind donations, etc.) to support park conservation efforts. Furthermore with good management, the impacts that visitors inevitably inflict could be minimized. Because Pico Bonito offered almost no services, no visitors arrived. Thus, to catch visitors, they had to implement their plan.

When they do manage to create plans, Latin American parks fail to implement them, wholly or partially, for a variety of reasons. On reason is the tendency of new governments to throw the plans — or the planners themselves — out the door. But a principal reason, referred to as "the disease," is the effect of traditional planning. The concept of a consultant's delivering polished plans on a silver platter to parks erects many barriers to implementation. But it's not just consultants who expect such delivery; parks and their governments often adhere to it as well.

RARE, on the other hand, wanted little to do with traditional plans that were (here come the barriers) expensive, time-consuming, esoteric, verbose, or quagmired with advanced methods, biological lists, long histories, and Martian theories. To distinguish our plan from traditional plans, we developed a lean, visually pleasing, and more friendly format. It included a timetable mandating who does what and when. We included a financial plan too. We rejected the whole notion of a finely sculpted plan that, rather than being useful, was more a statue on a bookshelf.

After four months, Honduras's first strategic public use plan, warmly known as PUP, came into being and was glamorously presented to the public in August 1999 before the state governor, funders, a representative of the army, and park officials from across Honduras. Despite Angelica's small investment, the PUP was already earning accolades. After all, it was the first of its kind in Honduras. And the staff wrote it.

Besides the PUP, the park itself already enjoyed its fame in Honduras. As the park president likes to say, "Pico Bonito boasts the highest mountain closest to the sea between Florida and Colombia." True or not, the peak that gives the park its name is the third highest in the country and perhaps the most well known precisely because it dwarfs the large port city of La Ceiba, which sits at the mountain's foot. Pico Bonito's steep walls so close to the highway and its gushing rivers that offer some of the best whitewater in Central America, make it a site to visit.

The park couldn't be better located either. Three international airports, a major port city, and a world-famous Lodge flank it. It is an hour's boat ride to some of the Caribbean's best diving and a straight drive west to Copan, one of the Mayan World's most famous ancient cities. From anywhere in La Ceiba you step out your door and there stands the mountain parting the clouds, girdled by rainforest, yet shrouded in mystique.

The park had so much potential and so few visitors. Pico Bonito only needed a good public use plan to crown it with guidebook fame.

Wrong Method
Despite its initial promise, the PUP did not work because Pico Bonito could not implement it. Despite any amount of coaxing and a mountain of enthusiasm, the plan lay inactive. We realized that Rossel, while a great nature guide student, was not an administrator and had no experience in public use management. The big lesson learned was that, to be implemented, the plan had to have a qualified, full-time public use coordinator.

But that was not a sufficient answer and we continued to wonder why so many strategic plans failed to get implemented. Frustrated, we posed the question to Honduran professionals, park managers, and international non-governmental organizations. People said it was a lack of money, political support, good personnel, clear laws, and on and on. But maybe the lack was in the quality of the planning methodology itself rather than the resources that go into it. Pico Bonito's PUP was, after all, only a pilot run. For example, the management zones were weakly linked to interpretive programs, we did not convince the park of the utility of interpretive themes, the plan did not propose regulations, and it did not focus much on the visitor experience.

Pico Bonito's Second PUP
We went back and broke the process up into several basic modules. Each one would be a workshop that covers one aspect of public use management such as regulations or "limits of acceptable change." These modules could be interchanged, replaced, or dropped, depending on park needs. We filled in many of the methodological holes such as regulations, better monitoring plan, better attraction evaluation, analysis of personnel and equipment needs, how to create a park fee system, and a financial plan that more closely followed a conventional business plan format. We adapted the US National Park Service's Visitor Experience and Resource Protection planning methodology which puts the visitor experience at the heart of zoning and product selection. Fortunately, through another program a year later, another opportunity emerged to wrest Pico Bonito's PUP from the clutches of death. Rodriguez felt that, with a renewed push and a better PUP, Pico Bonito could only capitalize on its incredible natural resources.

In December 2000, we built another PUP. Even before it was done, the head of the Honduran protected areas who managed a World Bank project for tourism development was so impressed with the plan that he said everyone who wanted funding from this million-dollar project had to write a PUP first. The project's biggest component was a major visitor center. Rodriguez reported that, after the selection committee did its study, it fully agreed with the placement, objectives, and design of the visitor center as proposed by the PUP. This PUP had the most realistic financial projection ever made for public use in a Honduran park. It precipitated the signing of a major cooperative agreement between the park and the big lodge in its buffer zone. The other park management groups looked on with eyes of envy, desperately hoping for the day when they too would get their magical PUP to solve their management problems. The methodology too had taken great strides and soon the program was on the docket for other countries in the RARE Center portfolio.

But Pico Bonito still did not have a public use coordinator to implement the plan. The park broiled in land tenancy battles and a nearly non-existent budget. The Pico Bonito staff struggled as month after month passed. They had gone through seven versions of their financial plan trying to get it right. They had reworked their strategy when the politics changed. They edited it and modified the layout. Yet the process dragged.

We grew nervous. If Pico Bonito continued to struggle with their PUP, what was our methodology's future? And a much bigger challenge lay ahead. Through a new project with the United Nations, RARE would be calling on the Public Use Planning Program to facilitate PUPs in six different World Heritage sites - simultaneously. What if they too catch what seems a contagious disease? What if our process was not, after all, very different from traditional planning?

Seismic Change
While the methodology was being tweaked last August, the 1973 classic, Small is Beautiful: Economics as If People Mattered, unintentionally entered into the project. Two paragraphs in the classic book written by economist EF Schumacher have had a lasting effect on the project:

Development does not start with goods; it starts with people and their education, organization, and discipline. Without these three, all resources remain latent, untapped, potential. There are prosperous societies with but the scantiest basis of natural wealth, and we have had a high level of education, organization, and discipline, produced an "economic miracle." In fact, these were miracles only for people whose attention is focused on the tip of the iceberg. The tip had been smashed to pieces, but the base, which is education, organization, and discipline, was still there…
Here lies the reason why development cannot be an act of creation, why it cannot be ordered, bought, comprehensively planned; why it requires a process of evolution. Education does not 'jump'; it is a gradual process of great subtlety. Organization does not 'jump'; it must gradually evolve to fit changing circumstances. And much the same goes for discipline. All three must evolve step by step, and the foremost task of development policy must be to speed this evolution…

We had been looking in the wrong places for our answer to why Latin American parks fail to implement their strategic plans. The problem was not the methodology, as we had assumed. Traditional planners almost always focus on methodology. Schumacher instructed, on the contrary, that it is not a matter of just ordering, buying, or planning better. It is a matter of building up the park's human resources: the personnel's education, organization, and discipline.

We had interpreted Pico Bonito's struggle as a sign of impending failure. Rather it was the birth of the first PUP. The seven attempts to do the financial plan were not, as we had resigned ourselves to believe, seven steps down death row. In reality, the park had not forgotten its plan, ignored it, or ceremoniously laid it down to rest on a bookshelf. The park staff was using it.

The staff was learning. We had assumed all that time that when a PUP was done, it would be implemented A to Z, starting with the zoning, moving to the ticketing system, and then building the monitoring program. But improving education, organization, and discipline does not happen in a linear fashion. It is a process of fits and starts.

Pico Bonito cannot all of a sudden begin to attract visitors. In reality, the staff of Pico Bonito continues to be this program's pioneer, working slowly and steadily with their PUP, remarkably, still without a public use coordinator.

Earlier in the process, the term disease, relating to our efforts, referred only to a general malaise that struck down plans. Later in the process, we realized that much more specifically the term refers to a park's focus on the plan rather than on its own institutional strengthening. The plan is only a tool in a learning process. For Pico Bonito to become successful at public use management, it must develop its education, organization, and discipline. And we will stick by them for as long as they try.

Our philosophy now is that you can give a park a strategic public use plan and the administrators will shine for a day, or you can help them learn how to plan strategically and their park will shine for life.

Post Script
Since we began developing it, the Public Use Planning Program has evolved into a two- to three-year learning process. In the first phase, the four public use coordinators involved in our project with the World Heritage Project, along with the newly hired Pico Bonito public use coordinator, recently completed a 45-day course to learn the PUP methodology. Then the coordinators go through the preparation, planning, and formalization of the PUP, assisted by RARE personnel. Thereafter they join the PUP learning portfolio, which is an electronic forum designed to increase learning through sharing experiences and group problem solving. After three years and perhaps two PUP drafts, the park should have acquired the basic skills necessary to plan and implement on their own.

Implementation Obstacles

Commonly protected areas argue they do not implement plans due to a lack of something: money, time, or personnel. A good strategic plan, however, foresees these limitations and considers them while planning. A strategic response would involve reducing expectations and investing more in finding new funding sources, for example, to compensate. Thus, administrative deficiencies do not normally qualify as root causes for non-implementation. Other causes, however, could be root causes.

POLITICAL
Governmental Change.
When governments change, existing plans can be tossed. Sometimes the planners themselves are tossed too.
Approval Procedures.
Overly bureaucratic procedures can bog down a plan for a long time, sapping it of its momentum and putting it out of date. A good strategic plan should know the procedures beforehand.
Political Fights.
Park decision-making, like any decision process, might involve power fights among stakeholders. If severe enough, a plan could be paralyzed or ultimately scuttled.

OWNERSHIP
When plans are done by outsiders, when staff or other stakeholders see very few of their ideas in the plan, or for whatever reason if the implementing park does not feel ownership for the plan, it will often be shelved.

PHYSICAL BARRIER
A disaster either natural or political - earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, disease breakouts, violence, major budget cuts, death of the park director - could interfere with implementation.

PHYSICAL LOSS
Plans have been known to disappear, get lost between consultants and parks, or otherwise disappear during office changes, fires, hard disk crashes, and so forth.

PLAN QUALITY
A plan's poor technical quality could derail implementation. If the plan has no work plan assigning who, when, where, and what, then the plan might be shelved. If the plan is exceedingly general or brief, too dreamy, unrealistic, misjudges approval procedures, has big false assumptions about stakeholders, is based on incorrect information, fails to muster stakeholder or park staff support, or suffers other errors, it could die.

CAPACITY
The most likely explanation is that the park does not have the education, organization, or discipline to implement. Education refers to their understanding of the breadth of possibilities as well as those possibilities' theory, implications, and applicability. This is the academic part. The park needs to have a team sufficiently organized to implement the plan. This means they should have the culture, operating systems, financial planning, teamwork, communication, and adequately trained personnel (especially the public use coordinator). Last, the park needs to wield the discipline, habits, understanding, motivation and commitment (especially under duress), and skills that facilitate fulfillment of tasks (such as agendas, to-do lists, weekly meetings, evaluation, culture to keep on track, and so forth).
It is worth mentioning that if a park does not update its plan when assumptions or interpretations of the park context change, implementation of an outdated plan will soon prove futile.

• Fundación Parque Nacional Pico Bonito. 1999, 2001. "Plan Estratégico de Uso Público para el Parque Nacional Pico Bonito 1999-2004". La Ceiba, Honduras. (fupnapib@laceiba.com)
• National Park Service. "Visitor Experience and Resource Protection."
• Schumacher, EF. 1973. Small Is Beautiful: Economics as If People Mattered. Blond & Briggs Ltd: London.
• Veverka, John. 1994. Master Interpretive Planning. Falcon Press: Helena, MO

Staff of Pico Bonito develop the park zone map.

Jon Kohl is manager in charge of public use planning at RARE Center for Tropical Conservation. This is the third article in a series written by Kohl and other staff on how RARE's ecotourism programs are taking on the obstacles to developing interpretation in developing country protected areas. See previous articles on the Nature Guide Training Program ("Overcoming Hurdles," Jul/Aug 2001) and the Trail Development Program ("Trail Building in Latin America," Sept/Oct 2001). Starting in the next issue of LEGACY, Kohl will write a column on interpretation and visitor management issues in Latin America.