The Protection of Federal Protected Natural Areas in Mexico: Relationship between the “Street-Level Bureaucrats” and the Territorial Surface of the PNA`s

Abstract

The designation of Natural Protected Areas is an important strategy within environmental policy for species conservation. Protected areas are subject to external and internal human actions that jeopardize their conservation. In the strategies for strengthening protected area policy and management, enforcing the law is essential. Inspectors authorized to apply the law help reduce illegal activities within protected areas. Continuously verifying compliance with the law is crucial to mitigating the negative impacts within these areas. The purpose of this document is to analyze the number of inspectors by size of protected area by state. Using databases from government institutions, it was found that there is an insufficiency of personnel to cover the largest size of protected areas. Moreover, in many cases, an increase in the size of protected areas is not accompanied by a corresponding increase in the number of inspectors. States with larger protected areas have the same number of or fewer inspectors to monitor compliance with the law than those with smaller ones.