This analysis examines equitable governance in Armenia's legal and policy framework through the lens of Lake Arpi National Park (LANP), located in the northwest of the country. The park’s remoteness and surrounding communities' dependence on land and natural resources make questions of rights, participation, and conservation-related livelihood impacts particularly relevant. By comparing national law, biodiversity policy, and management arrangements of LANP, the author examine four questions: how rights and livelihoods are protected, how transparent decisions are, who can participate in decision-making, and how well institutions coordinate and adapt.
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Protected areas (PAs) are not only about protecting biodiversity; they are also about the people who live within and around them. Protected areas can only deliver lasting conservation outcomes if attention is paid not just to their size and ecological effectiveness, but also to who makes decisions, whose rights are recognized, and how conservation costs and benefits are shared. These questions are especially timely with Armenia hosting the 17th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP17) in October 2026. The country recently revised its Law on Specially Protected Nature Areas and adopted a new National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan for 2026–2030 (NBSAP), creating an opportunity to assess whether these reforms provide stronger foundations for fairer and more inclusive governance.
This analysis examines equitable governance in Armenia's legal and policy framework through the lens of Lake Arpi National Park (LANP), located in the northwest of the country. The park’s remoteness and surrounding communities' dependence on land and natural resources make questions of rights, participation, and conservation-related livelihood impacts particularly relevant. By comparing national law, biodiversity policy, and management arrangements of LANP, I examine four questions: how rights and livelihoods are protected, how transparent decisions are, who can participate in decision-making, and how well institutions coordinate and adapt.
Who is protected and from what?
Recognizing the rights and livelihoods of people who may bear the costs of conservation is crucial to equitable governance. Communities often have long-standing relationships with the areas where they live, including customary rights over land and traditional knowledge on resource use. PA law should protect these rights and ensure conservation benefits and restrictions are shared fairly.
In practice, formal ownership and regulated resource-use interests receive comparatively better legal protection in Armenia. Updated policy instruments increasingly acknowledge community rights, gender equality, traditional knowledge, and livelihood concerns. Yet these advances still do not provide a consistent system for protecting the rights of key stakeholders. Customary and collective rights remain weakly articulated, while general guarantees of non-discrimination, accessible complaint mechanisms, livelihood safeguards, compensation, and equitable sharing of conservation costs and benefits are largely absent.
Who can access and question decisions?
Transparency in governance means more than being able to request information. People should also be able to see what decisions were made, why, and how well the responsible institutions are performing. Communities also need ways to challenge decisions and seek remedies when they are harmed.
Stakeholders have access to environmental information in Armenia, institutional responsibilities are relatively clear, and financial control and monitoring are well established. However, authorities are less consistently required to publish information without being asked, explain the reasons behind decisions, make management performance public, or enable independent scrutiny. This means the framework is considerably stronger in administrative accountability than in public accountability.
Who has a voice?
Participation matters only if people have a meaningful opportunity to shape decisions that affect them. A seat at a meeting or consultation is not the same as influence. The framework increasingly provides channels for participation and representation, but these are unevenly institutionalized. Participation mechanisms and representation have expanded, particularly in the NBSAP and the Lake Arpi National Park Management Plan; however, guaranteed influence, inclusion, and community-level authority remain comparatively limited there. Thus, the central issue is not whether participation exists, but whether it becomes a durable governance right linked to representation, influence, and decision-making power.
Can the system learn and adapt?
PA management must change as circumstances change. Monitoring biodiversity is critical to revisiting conservation plans, but managers should also respond to changing livelihoods, social conditions, and community feedback. Here, the system's strengths include clearly defined cross-institutional coordination, biodiversity monitoring requirements, and capacity building of staff. These advances are identifiable, particularly in the NBSAP and the Management Plan. The main weakness is ensuring that ecological findings, social change, and stakeholder concerns systematically lead to changes in how the park is managed.
Where the gaps remain
Three patterns stand out in Armenia's PA-related legal framework. Administrative responsibilities and monitoring are better developed than safeguards for participation, rights, and livelihoods; policy commitments often go further than what the law guarantees; and site-level participatory arrangements are not always sustained over time. The LANP case illustrates this last point clearly: its Management Plan introduced community representation and co-management mechanisms that the 2020 organizational Statute did not fully carry forward.
It is important to identify the governance gaps at the relevant level given each instrument plays a different role in the governance system. The 2006 Law on Specially Protected Nature Areas provides the system's administrative and information-access foundations but remains strongly state-centered. The 2026 revised Law on Specially Protected Nature Areas creates space for stakeholder involvement and local governance and planning that can respond to changing conditions. Still, it does not translate these into comprehensive participatory or rights-based guarantees. The NBSAP articulates the most ambitious national policy direction on community rights, inclusion, participation, public information, and capacity building. At the site level, the Management Plan demonstrates how community representation, co-management, ways for communities to raise complaints and disputes, livelihood recognition, and adaptive planning can be operationalized. However, the LANP 2020 organizational Statute focuses more on internal organizational governance and does not preserve these participatory arrangements.
Overall, Armenia’s legal and policy framework is gradually becoming more open to participation and community concerns, but progress remains uneven. As Armenia translates its commitments to the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF) into national implementation while preparing to host and chair COP17, its main challenge remains making participation, accountability, rights safeguards, and adaptive governance consistent and durable across legislation, policy, and PA-level instruments. Because the remaining gaps occur at different governance levels, addressing them requires complementary action by legislators, the Government and Ministry of Environment, PA governing bodies and administrations, with civil society, researchers and development partners playing supporting roles.
What should change next?
For Armenia's PA-related legal framework, key priorities are protecting rights and livelihoods; ensuring transparency in decision-making, and strengthening stakeholder participation; building management that can respond to changing conditions and feedback; and ensuring consistency across Armenia’s PA governance framework. Legal and site-level safeguards should more clearly recognize rightsholders, provide accessible grievance and remedy mechanisms, protect livelihoods, and consider how conservation costs and benefits are distributed. Transparency should shift from providing access to information to regularly publishing information, including performance information and the reasons behind important decisions, without waiting for requests. Participation should move beyond consultation by guaranteeing representation, requiring consideration of stakeholder input, and establishing clear procedures for selection, consultation, and feedback. Adaptive management should combine long-term strategic planning with flexible action plans and annual work programs that respond to biodiversity monitoring, findings from assessments of management effectiveness, socioeconomic change, livelihood impacts, and stakeholder feedback. Finally, NBSAP commitments should be translated more consistently into legislation and PA-level instruments, while preserving effective participatory arrangements already demonstrated in Lake Arpi National Park.