Richard Clarke

Worldwide, the dynamics in which protected areas and in urban contexts, public parks and other forms of greenspaces have survived, is challenging. For example, impacts of climate change, seemingly endless political instabilities, decreased funding opportunities, increased numbers of tourists, notably so since the pandemic, a need to manage often conflicting purposes of conservation and use, all draw upon, managing agencies’ increasingly limited funds, staff capacities, their skills, knowledge, expertise and resources often simultaneously. Such events can have deep-seated impacts of change on environments and in turn on their management. Their effects can be of a temporary nature, invariably will warrant adaptive management actions to maintain an area’s purposes and many activities will engage with project and/or programme management principles of working. This chapter provides a review of project management in environmental contexts and identifies key challenges. We draw upon literature in the field of protected area, landscape and greenspace management. In this context, we discuss key principles of project management, with supporting theories and concepts from a generic perspective of the discipline of project management. Despite many managing agencies presenting themselves as able project-oriented organisations, key challenges that appear to be common amongst all projects are highlighted in protected area contexts and examples are provided within the text and through case studies provided.

For decades, literature on the management of green and blue spaces and their uses has been founded in two distinctive sources. The academic repository, comprised of primarily peer-reviewed journal papers, has tended to detract practitioners for their very nature of academic design, composition, debate and discourse traditionally deployed. Yet within these works, a critical voice on both practice and theory is developed contributing to enhancements in the management of natural spaces.