87 Management & Policy Issues eco.mont – Volume 10, Number 1, January 2018 ISSN 2073-106X print version – ISSN 2073-1558 online version: http://epub.oeaw.ac.at/eco.mont https://dx.doi.org/10.1553/eco.mont-10-1s87 Private Protected Areas in Latin America: Between conservation, sustainability goals and economic interests. A review Benedikt Hora, Carla Marchant & Axel Borsdorf Keywords: private mountain protected areas, local development, conservation Abstract Worldwide, but particularly in Latin America, private protected areas (PPAs), including in mountain areas, have become increasingly numerous. In some Latin American countries, PPAs complement the public protected areas to a significant degree. Beneficiaries of these private protection initiatives, which often close gaps in fragmented biomes, may be governments or eco-tourism operators. Drawbacks of PPAs are the lack of clear definitions and ownership, the absence of suitable management, green grabbing, and limited government support. This article gives an overview of PPAs in mountain regions and presents the most important literature published so far. Introduction Worldwide, a trend towards privatization can be ob- served (Jeanetti 2008). Even in countries with a strong market tradition, many services are being contracted out to the private sector, justifying this development in terms of effectiveness, cost effciency, and the gener- ally poor performance of public agencies (Donahue 1989; Kramer et al. unpublished). These trends are motivated by the hope that market incentives may re- duce costs and encourage innovations. Castree (2008) coined the term neoliberalization of nature to refer to the current trend that seeks to apply market forces to nat- ural spaces, demonstrating that the environment does not escape these trends. Traditionally nature protection, conservation and regional development have been the concern of public authorities (Langholz & Lassoie 2001), as normally the implementation of protected areas needed public f- nancing and was not regarded as a business. However, the privatization trend reached nature conservation in the late 1980s (Holmes 2015). In many countries, pri- vate actors declared land as a protected area, bought land to create such sites, or even took over the con- trol of former national parks. Igoe and Brockington (2007) argue that the neo-liberalization of conserva- tion involves the regulation of nature through com- modifcation. Rivera and Vallejos (2015) showed that one cen- tral point of global politics in conservation was the emergence of large non-governmental environmental organizations of global infuence, including Conserva- tion International, The Nature Conservancy (TNC), the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the World Resources Institute (Zimmerer et al. 2004). These new actors in the feld of international policy play a key role in conservation and are closely linked with the creation of private parks. However, the private sector, or public-private part- nerships, can offer a number of advantages for pro- tected area operations and management: they can provide fnancial and technical resources, contribute to marketing and sustainable self-fnancing, and bring operational expertise to the competitive industry of international nature tourism. Furthermore, many studies have demonstrated the private sector’s increasing role in biodiversity conser- vation (Edwards 1995; Merrifeld 1996; Krug 2001). Following the recent opening of private protected ar- eas (PPAs) in some states, the commitment by other countries to expand the total combined protected ar- eas in a representative and well-connected manner, as part of the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Aichi Target 11, will require the inclusion of a range of pro- tection mechanisms over a variety of tenures, includ- ing strengthening the status of protected areas over private land (Woodley et al. 2012). The aim of this article is to give a critical review of this new kind of protected areas, and to analyse whether the liberal movement of the state towards private initiatives may lead to enhanced conservation and protection of critical biodiversity, labile ecology, increased participation by citizen, and sustainable de- velopment. We will look specifcally at mountain pro- tected areas in the Latin American context. Mountains are important as ecosystem service providers, are of- ten hotspots of biodiversity, strongly affected by the effects of climate change and globalization, and infu- enced by the land demands of amenity migrants. They also attract visitors with specifc interests in nature, bird watching, hiking, biking, rafting and climbing, among other activities (Viviroli et al. 2011). This paper seeks to answer the following questions: What is the current state of private conservation in mountain areas? Is it possible to identify global trends in this phenomenon? What are the advantages and dis- advantages of this model of conservation in mountain areas? Methodology From a methodological perspective, this article was conceived as a narrative review, that is “a kind of publi- cation that aims to describe and discuss the state of the science of