Evaluation of the Management Effectiveness of German National Parks—Experiences, Results, Lessons Learned and Future Prospects

Since 2005 until today, experience has been gained in the preparation, implementation and impacts of the evaluation of the management effectiveness of German national parks. This process began with the development of a quality set containing fields of action, criteria, standards and a questionnaire to assess the state of national park management. This quality set was applied in the first voluntary full evaluation of German national parks, which took place from 2009 to 2012. An assessment of the full evaluation and the following interim evaluation (2015–2018) demonstrated the positive effects of the evaluation for the national parks, but also revealed some weaknesses of the quality set and the evaluation process. For this reason, work has been underway since 2019 to further improve the evaluation method; however, this has not yet been completed. The article provides an overview of the entire process. It concludes with considerations on the transferability of the evaluation method to other countries and gives some recommendations as to the most important aspects to be considered when evaluating the management effectiveness of national parks.