The study, published in the International Journal of Anthropology and Ethnology, draws on six field visits between September 2024 and May 2026, thirty-five interviews, twenty-three household visits including five oral histories, direct observation, and a dense body of policy and administrative documents. Its lead author, Qingyuan Li, and co-author Yan Ma, both of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, set out to answer a deceptively simple question: how do formal rules, culturally embedded practices, and monitored ecological change actually shape one another on the ground? Their answer challenges the way co-management is usually evaluated, which tends to treat institutions as the mechanism, ecology as the outcome, and culture as decorative background.

Wuyishan is an unusually revealing place to ask such questions. It is the only one of China’s first five national parks that overlaps a UNESCO World Heritage property inscribed under both cultural and natural criteria. Taoist texts from the Tang dynasty classified the mountain as the Sixteenth Grotto-Heaven, a sacred site within a ranked geography of numinous peaks. Zhu Xi, the towering figure of Neo-Confucianism, wrote and lectured there for more than five decades, founding the Wuyi Jingshe academy in 1183. Tea has been cultivated, classified, and traded from the region for centuries, traveling Dutch East India Company routes to Europe as bohea and overland along the Great Tea Road to Russia. The Fujian section of the park today covers more than 1,000 square kilometers, nearly 80 percent of the park, contains 28 natural villages and 3,415 registered residents, and has 66.4 percent of its land collectively owned.

The researchers’ framework demands a strict evidentiary standard. A relationship counts as co-constitutive only when a documented governance episode shows reciprocal change across at least two domains: a change in one domain traceable to an alteration in the form, meaning, or consequences of another. Mere co-presence, broad coupling, or descriptive entanglement does not qualify. This distinction matters because it converts a fashionable metaphor into something that can be tested, and potentially falsified, in other protected areas.

The clearest co-constitutive episode in the dataset involves a forest easement in Aotou Village. Under China’s tripartite rights system for collective forest land, ownership stays with the village collective while the park administration acquires specified protection authority for a fixed contractual period. Intensive bamboo management had created tension between watershed protection and village livelihoods. When easement agreements restricted intensive use in exchange for compensation, villagers were initially suspicious. Their insistence on retaining collective ownership shaped how the agreement was designed and interpreted, while the park’s contractual clarity and reliable payments shaped what villagers were willing to accept. The decisive feedback was not an abstract indicator but something everyone could see: water running clear downstream again. As one villager put it, when the water cleared and the compensation arrived on time, people knew the arrangement could work. At the scale of the Fujian section, the 2025 annual report records bamboo-forest easements covering about 6,053 hectares.

Tea culture supplies the second movement of the argument. Local growers evaluate their product through shanchang, a place-based category linking mountain shape, rock and soil, shade, moisture, surrounding vegetation, and cultivation history to sensory quality. A related idiom describes ideal tea-forest structure as wearing a cap, belt, and shoes: forest retained on hilltops moderates exposure and runoff, vegetation along slopes slows erosion, and ground cover protects soil and tea roots. This is not folklore appended to agriculture; it is a compact local model of forest–tea ecology. A tea farmer in Tianxin Village explained that the famous rock rhyme and rock bone and floral fragrance of Wuyi tea come from the harmonious ecological environment of each shanchang, adding that the ecological environment is the community’s rice bowl. Yet the researchers are careful to note the limits of cultural logic alone: shared ecological knowledge does not automatically produce restraint when tea prices soar, which is precisely where formal institutions enter as complementary enforcement.

That complementarity is visible in the Yanzike ecological tea garden, a demonstration project that translates traditional forest–tea knowledge into a standardized agroecological model. Taller trees provide shade and regulate microclimates, soybeans and rapeseed serve as green manure, and tea varieties are matched to local conditions, reducing chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Photovoltaic pest-control lamps and displays of temperature, humidity, and particulate matter make environmental conditions visible to managers and visitors alike. An interviewee described the project as an application of traditional ecological wisdom in which traditional culture and modern science jointly construct a modern ecological tea garden. Cultural knowledge lends the intervention legitimacy; scientific and administrative resources make it transferable.

Ritual does similar work in public. The tea-offering and mountain-calling ritual, jicha hanshan, descends from Song-dynasty customs and a Yuan-era rite at the Imperial Tea Garden, where in 1332 officials erected a platform from which drums were beaten and calls made for tea buds to emerge around the solar term of Jingzhe. Today the practice is listed as municipal-level intangible cultural heritage and staged publicly at tea sites. A scenic-area official summarized its ecological ethic succinctly: to ask the mountains for a living, one must respect them. The researchers treat such public staging analytically rather than romantically, noting that heritage presentation recontextualizes ritual and introduces commercial incentives, but they conclude that ritual gives conservation a culturally grounded language through which ecological responsibility is communicated and made meaningful.

Ecology, in turn, feeds back into governance through two complementary channels. Administratively, the park’s 2025 monitoring program conducted six rounds of surface-water sampling at 33 locations using 24 parameters, established 44 soil-monitoring plots, and recorded eight newly identified taxa, bringing the cumulative total to 62. Forest coverage in the Fujian section stands at nearly 94 percent. Situated observation runs alongside: a Hongxing Village resident who combines a family rock-tea business with work as a forest ranger patrols daily with a partner, flies a drone, and uploads images through standardized reporting procedures. His terrain familiarity directs where monitoring attention goes, while the reporting system converts local observation into evidence that travels across administrative levels. The park-wide system comprises 80 forest rangers and 98 patrol grids. Compensation and employment close the loop: in 2025 the administration paid 21.85 million renminbi to owners of ecological public-welfare forests and collective rights holders, and employed 72 conservation personnel, 80 rangers, and 26 checkpoint staff. Residents’ tea-sector income was estimated at roughly 1.3 billion renminbi.

The authors are candid about asymmetry. Public agencies retain legal and spatial authority; communities influence how rules operate and how ecological outcomes are interpreted, not the formal allocation of power. Reciprocity does not imply consensus or harmony. But the comparative payoff is concrete. The framework identifies four enabling conditions for similar dynamics elsewhere: durable institutional channels for evaluation and revision, ecological knowledge embedded in livelihood practice, visible connections between ecological quality and livelihood or identity, and organizations capable of translating situated observations across administrative levels. Where those conditions hold, whether in pastoral Sanjiangyuan, in contractual parks modeled on the Makuleke case in South Africa, or in tribally co-managed Bears Ears, culture can function as a practical medium of governance rather than a heritage label. Where they do not, the Wuyishan configuration may simply fail to emerge. Either way, the study offers something rare in conservation scholarship: a testable account of how rules, meaning, and mountains make each other.

Subject of Research: Institution–culture–ecology co-constitution in community co-management at Wuyishan National Park, China

Article Title: Beyond coupling and entanglement: institution–culture–ecology co-constitution in community co-management at Wuyishan National Park

Article References: Li, Q., & Ma, Y. (2026). Beyond coupling and entanglement: institution–culture–ecology co-constitution in community co-management at Wuyishan National Park. International Journal of Anthropology and Ethnology, 10(1), Article 17. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41257-026-00166-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s41257-026-00166-w

Keywords: Wuyishan National Park, community co-management, co-constitution, social-ecological systems, local ecological knowledge, tea culture, shanchang, protected-area governance, ecological compensation, intangible cultural heritage, China national parks, environmental anthropology

The Racha Islands, comprising the larger inhabited Racha Yai and the uninhabited Racha Noi, lie roughly 21 to 25 kilometers south of Phuket in the Andaman Sea. The protected area covers 375.359 square kilometers of water, reef and coastline, and sits in one of Thailand’s most intensively visited marine tourism destinations. Every day, flotillas of dive boats, snorkeling charters and recreational vessels converge on the islands’ fringing coral reefs. The park was created under Section 22 of Thailand’s Act on the Promotion of Marine and Coastal Resources Management, with the ministerial notification published in the Royal Thai Government Gazette on 13 March 2023. Crucially, the notification expires after five years, adding a layer of urgency to the question of whether management can mature quickly enough to justify renewal.

To evaluate the young park, researchers from Mahidol University and Thailand’s Department of Marine and Coastal Resources applied the International Union for Conservation of Nature and World Commission on Protected Areas management effectiveness framework, one of the most widely used auditing tools in global conservation. They adapted indicators from the Management Effectiveness Tracking Tool and a marine scorecard developed for the World Bank, producing a battery of 43 indicators spanning six components of the management cycle: context, planning, inputs, process, outputs and outcomes. Evidence was compiled between May and October 2025 through document analysis, questionnaire surveys and interviews with 69 respondents, including 50 local resource users and tourism stakeholders and 19 institutional respondents, along with field observations and available ecological monitoring data. Each indicator was scored on a four-point scale, with component scores calculated as percentages of the maximum possible total.

The results paint a picture of a protected area whose legal skeleton is strong but whose operational muscle is thin. The context component, which measures the legal, institutional and threat-related foundation for management, scored highest at 73.3 percent. Awareness among surveyed users was substantial: 60 percent identified the park’s habitat function, 48 percent recognized its importance for marine tourism, and more than 90 percent acknowledged ongoing threats to marine and coastal resources. The outputs component followed at 66.7 percent, with more than 75 percent of planned activity categories implemented on schedule, including mooring-buoy installation, surveillance patrols, underwater clean-ups, coral restoration and public-awareness campaigns. In other words, the park is doing things, not just declaring them.

But the component scores fell away sharply where resources matter most. Inputs, which capture financing, staffing, equipment and information, received the lowest score of just 33.3 percent. At the time of the assessment, the Protected Area Management Centre responsible for the park had only six staff members to cover island-based fieldwork, vessel operations, patrols, technical tasks and administration. Of the Centre’s two patrol vessels, one required repair and the other, the only operational boat, suffered frequent breakdowns. The temporary island office was not fully functional. The management budget depended entirely on annual government allocations with no secure multi-year financing, and while ecological baseline information existed, socio-economic baseline data were absent entirely. The process component, reflecting how management actually operates day to day, scored 48.5 percent, hampered by reactive maintenance, uncertainty about enforcement procedures and an advisory committee, appointed in March 2025, that had not yet held a single meeting.

Planning occupied an intermediate position at 58.3 percent, and here the study uncovered a subtle but consequential failure. A general five-year management plan covering 2024 to 2028 provided strategic direction across administration, monitoring, enforcement, reef conservation and stakeholder participation, and the park’s three management zones reflected reef locations, coastal habitats and differentiated use controls. Yet the plan’s objectives lacked quantitative targets and measurable outcome indicators, and stakeholder participation existed mainly on paper. Local users and tourism operators had been consulted during the park’s designation but played no substantive role in preparing either the five-year plan or the annual implementation plan for fiscal year 2025. The indicator measuring participation in planning received a score of zero, a deliberate distinction between including participation in policy documents and actually involving people in decisions.

The outcomes component, arguably the most important measure of whether any of this effort is working, scored 55.6 percent with evidence that was distinctly uneven. Most surveyed users perceived the overall level of threats as broadly unchanged. Ecological monitoring indicated stable or improving conditions at several reef sites but deterioration at others, meaning no park-wide trend could yet be established. Most respondents reported little change in income or related socio-economic conditions, and without a pre-designation baseline, researchers cannot attribute any observed change to the park’s management. Self-reported compliance was high at 83.7 percent, and more than 80 percent of surveyed users expressed satisfaction with management and enforcement, but recurring violations such as anchoring on coral reefs and fish feeding persisted. Fewer than half of institutional respondents demonstrated a solid understanding of the management plan itself, an internal knowledge gap that bodes poorly for coordinated implementation.

These findings resonate with a growing global literature on the gap between protected-area designation and protected-area performance. Research has repeatedly shown that legal designation alone does not ensure effective conservation when staffing, funding, enforcement and monitoring remain inadequate, and recent analyses indicate that marine protected areas at an actively managed stage achieve stronger ecological outcomes than those that have merely reached initial implementation. The Racha Islands assessment deliberately avoids the harsher label of paper park, since genuine management activities have followed legal establishment. Instead, the authors characterize it as an early-stage protected area in which implementation has advanced faster than the capacity to demonstrate its effects, a distinction that matters for the intensifying global debate over whether rapidly expanding marine protection coverage delivers real conservation.

Tourism emerges from the study as both the park’s greatest challenge and a potential source of strength. Diving and tourism groups already contribute to mooring-buoy work, underwater clean-ups and conservation initiatives, supplementing the government’s limited capacity, and evidence from the Great Barrier Reef shows such partnerships can mature into genuine site stewardship. But recurring pressures from anchoring, fish feeding, physical contact with corals and intensive vessel traffic suggest that zoning and mooring buoys are not enough without better communication of spatial rules and consistent enforcement. The authors argue that tourism operators should be treated as management partners rather than merely regulated users, through structured arrangements for operator briefings, violation reporting and collaborative monitoring. Notably, the study could not assess whether signage and operator briefings actually reach the transient international tourists who dominate visitation, leaving a significant blind spot for future research.

The path forward, according to the researchers, lies in predictable financing, adequate staffing and equipment, a site-specific management plan developed through meaningful participation, and a feasible set of measurable indicators tied directly to management objectives. Encouragingly, some institutional responses have already followed: the advisory committee held its first formal meeting in Phuket in July 2026, and the Department of Marine and Coastal Resources has begun preparing the site-specific plan required under Clause 13 of the designation notification, using the assessment findings to inform the process. Whether these steps translate into demonstrable reef recovery and community benefit remains an open question that only sustained monitoring can answer. For now, the Racha Islands offer a candid early benchmark for the hundreds of newly declared marine protected areas across Southeast Asia’s tourism-dependent coastlines, a reminder that protecting ocean biodiversity is less about drawing boundaries on maps and more about building the institutions capable of defending what lies inside them.

Subject of Research: Management effectiveness of the newly established Racha Islands Marine Protected Area in Phuket, Thailand

Article Title: Bridging the Gap Between Legal Designation and Management Outcomes: Evidence from a Newly Established Marine Protected Area in Thailand

Article References: Satumanatpan, S., Praisankul, S., Chankum, P., Singin, P., & Pantorn, T. (2026). Bridging the Gap Between Legal Designation and Management Outcomes: Evidence from a Newly Established Marine Protected Area in Thailand. Environmental Management, 76(10), Article 330. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-026-02622-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00267-026-02622-x

Keywords: marine protected areas, Thailand, coral reefs, IUCN-WCPA framework, management effectiveness, marine tourism, Phuket, ocean conservation, protected area governance, stakeholder participation, Andaman Sea, environmental management