Sub-Saharan Africa is home to 13% of biodiversity and represents approximately 20% of the world’s forests. Protected areas play an essential role in protecting biodiversity and ecosystems. Since the first protected area was set up in 1925 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Virunga National Park, several thousand parks have been established. But the structural lack of funding, limited management capacities, weak institutions and governance complicate the missions of these areas to protect wildlife and their habitats effectively. To alleviate these difficulties, innovative management models have been set up over the last 20 years: states and NGOs co-manage these parks through public-private partnerships. These collaborative management partnerships (CMPs) can also go as far as delegating the full management of thousands of square kilometres of a territory in one or several states to national or international NGOs. Another specificity of these CMPs is their duration: the collaborations are set up for several decades (around 25-30 years, even 40 years in certain cases), while NGOs usually support […]