The answer varies from country to country. Certain countries are more pro-active than others. Thus, are you looking for examples from around the globe, just focusing on Europe?

Propriety rigth is an institution. Protected areas are arranged by governement. So,  governments recognize the Protected Areas as economic institutions

Dear Martina,

In my life happened that I worked as a vise-chief of Dep. of Eco-safety of Tranthcarpathians region of Ukraine, not far from your country, and was responsible for nature Conservation. In Ukraine it depends on who is a guider of protected area. It can be the ministry of Environment, Forestry, Education etc., even Defend Ministry. Interestingly but the best following of nature Conservation legislation are areas under guidance of Min. of Forestry (they have enough money).

Other important thing is what category of Nat. Cons. area you have to do, and even what zone of the area. If it is international 1a category - Ukrainian Nature Reserve, so it is minimal, if NNP zone of limited economy activity – can be the very intensive.

For more details, please, look my book Conservation Biology. Except of Ukrainian, it inserts as well analysis of Hungarian and Slovak legislation, and examples of NNP from different continents with peculiarities of their exploitation. About Army forestries I can recommend other small book On the perspectives of development the ecological net in the army forestries (on example of Uzhgorod forestry). If Ukrainian language is not of great problem for you, look, please, my site.

Andrey

Dear all,

thank you for your answers. I appreciate your interest and time. I would like to describe the economic value of protected areas in my thesis but I do not know how to catch it. I thought that Convention on Biological Diversity would be the best way how to start with describing but it is not so true like I hoped. I have to read more literature to target better way :)

@Mounir Louhaichi: Thank you. I would like to focuse on developed countries in general because Europe seems to be not representative sample (in my humble opinion) and all world is a very wide concept for thesis.

@Boukary Ouedraogo: Thank you for this idea.

@Andrey A. Kovalchuk: Thank you. I will look your book and try to find what I need. According to IUCN the Czech PLA is category 5 but Ukraine, Hungary and Slovakia are so close to Czech Republic so it could be analogous. 

Yes,

in Slovakia as well cat. 5.

A.

dear colleagues

In all science and law, we need to define our terminology. What is an economic institution in this context. 

As Boukary already observed. Protected Areas may include land ownership. Owners may be legal persons (nature foundation, company, cooperative, local, regional or national government), a natural person or a mix of both. The latter is usually the case in Protected Landscapes (e.g. Majella NP Italy). In that case The Protected Area/Landscape Authority is in effect the competent authority of regional Land Use Zoning (for details see attached), or in other words, a regulator.

With reference to Andrey. If the entire land area of a protected area is publicly owned (local, regional or national) in many countries State Forestry Services not only manage the area, but also can sell products (timber, hunting rights), carry arms and may arrest people, unlike other government agencies. 

Land sales in publicly owned Protected Areas (say for mines) are usually handled by separate agencies, e.g. Ministry of Lands in Namibia, Rijksvastgoedbedrijf in the Netherlands that act as the custodial of public land.

In the Netherlands, and no doubt elsewhere, a privately-owned National Park (e.g. Hoge Veluwe) may operates the Protected Area as a not-for-profit business without direct subsidy of government. This is only possible in this case by cross-subsidy of the entry fees paid for the Museum also a component of the NP. 

Further, within many Reserves, game and bird reserves in particular, highly mobile animals are protected on privately owned land. In effect "Reserve" is a Land Use Zoning category.

Finally in some Protected Areas, a substantial economic asset, the hunting rights for the huntable game is not owned by the land owner, but by a separate legal person (hunting association).

Anyhow, a fascinating topic.

Article Where the bears roam in Majella National Park, Italy

Dear Martina,

As rightly said earlier, this depends on country to country. Here in India, PAs are basically looked at provider of ecosystem services, which can be quantified in economic aspects for evaluating its services in monetary terms. You can have a look at IUCN publication https://portals.iucn.org/library/efiles/documents/PAG-002.pdf for similar examples. 

Best wishes,

Dr M A Khalid

It varies from country to country.

Yes it depends from country to country, but it also depends on what you say by "government recognises". In most western countries PAs are legal institutions, the law creating them also creates an organisation responsible for managing it, which is a legal person and has rights and duties (including economic rights and duties). From a legal perspective, I would say those governments do recognise PAs as economic institutions.

But if you are talking about a recognition in terms of public policy, that is, if governments actively treat PAs as economic institutions and consider their economic role when planning their actions, then different countries have different realities. I researched a similar question in recent years, comparing French and Brazilian conservation law and policy, and I found that France tends to exploit better the economic role of protected areas. In my opinion that is due to the presence/lack of substantive rights to promote the economic role of protected areas. While both countries do recognise the economic role of PAs as a principle, France has created more substantive means to promote that role and benefit from it.