Parks and protected areas are valuable assets to developing nations, whether viewed as environmental, economic or social goods. Nevertheless, to date there are few examples where the full potential economic rent of protected areas has been captured efficiently or distributed effectively. This severely limits the capacity of developing nations to sustain their natural resources. In Sub-Saharan Africa the crisis is acute, characterized by the rapid pace of deforestration, soil erosion, destruction of flora and fauna, and the depletion of water supplies. Many African nations have completed national environmental assessments that call for an expansion and diversification of protected areas. Several areas have been designated as protected areas- national parks, game preserves, wildlife management areas all with different levels of restrictions on their use by members of local communities. The methods of valuation used to determine appropriate levels of compensation for local communities and for cost recovery through users' fees to make natural resource management sustainable requires innovative approaches to valuing stakeholder opportunity costs, recreational demand, and existence value. The Contingent Valuation (CV) method is one way of determining levels of willingness-to-pay of visitors to protected areas and willingness to accept compensation by local residents. Once appropriate valuation techniques have been used, the key is to determine a viable benefit sharing scheme for shareholders to share rents and compensate local residents for foregone access to those natural resources found in the protected area.
