From Trails to Tokens: FinTech Frontiers for Sustainable Stewardship and Transparent Governance in Protected Recreation Landscapes

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🔬研究者:Researchers in conservation finance and blockchain governance can use the T2T model as a testable framework for empirical studies on trust and transparency in protected areas.

🏢実務担当者:Practitioners in park management and conservation finance can adopt the four-phase pilot protocol to design transparent revenue-sharing systems using smart contracts.

🏛政策担当者:Policymakers working on biodiversity financing and natural capital accounting can evaluate the model as a tool for enhancing accountability and community trust in protected landscapes.

Protected recreation landscapes grapple with a chronic trust deficit driven by financial opacity, operational leakage, and social inequity as challenges largely sustained by traditional cash-based revenue systems. This paper introduces the Trails-to-Tokens (T2T) model, a novel governance architecture designed to bridge the gap between physical stewardship interactions (Trails) and transparent,digital financial instruments (Tokens). Synthesizing Socio-Ecological Systems and Institutional Trust theories, the T2T framework utilizes blockchain-enabled smart contracts to automate revenue sharing and reward stewardship based on verifiable ecological and social outcomes. A key contribution of this paper is the transition from purely conceptual discourse to a data-informed architectural roadmap.The study internalizes empirical findings from African protected areas, where revenue accountability often shows significant downward trends and community trust remains low. The T2T model addresses these failures by providing an operationalization matrix and a fourphase pilot protocol intended for future empirical validation. By replacing discretionary human intermediaries with immutable digital ledgers, the model establishes a performance-linked social contract that is hypothesized to restore trust and foster financial resilience, provided the initial rule-setting is transparent. This paper offers a replicable methodology for conservation managers and policymakers, moving beyond aspirational digital trends toward a functional, transparent, and inclusive system for landscape governance. The result is a transformative approach that secures the long-term legitimacy of biodiversity financing through technological accountability and measurable stewardship.

• semanticscholar https://doi.org/10.47852/bonviewfsi62028301first seen 2026-05-30 05:26:20 · last seen 2026-06-16 05:19:06