This book has been prepared as a contribution to the IUCN World Parks Congress in Sydney in 2014. The global community is at the interface of ensuring the quality of protected area governance and management, together with the way that effectively managed and
equitably governed protected areas systems can support society to meet current and future challenges. Resources that support capacity development are a crucial component of the value chain to enable competent professionals and effective institutions to achieve satisfactory outcomes. It is our hope that this learning resource will be an excellent foundation for the major enterprise in capacity development that must follow—one of the important outcomes of the IUCN World Parks Congress contributing to ‘The Promise of Sydney’.