| Summary: | The social dimension has been increasingly incorporated into the conservation of Protected Areas' (PAs) framework. A criticism of the top-down managerial styles of PAs brought about the inclusion of community-based management within its framework. However, there is still a need to go beyond community-based approaches and establish the <b><i>interactive dialogical model</i></b> to negotiate conservation on the basis of 'political ecology' that study the interface of social and environmental dynamics in PAs. Thus, the focus of this thesis is two-fold: to explore relational tools of analysis to identify, describe and analyse social-environmental interactions in PAs; and to explore the value of these results as the basis to support <b><i>interactive participatory processes</i></b> of conservation in PAs. Two case studies, Monte Tezio (Italy) and Utria (Colombia) were chosen to carry out this thesis, not only as a comparative study but also to contrast them in order to understand the <i>heterogeneity of social-environmental interactions within and between places</i>. The main theoretical and methodological construction of this thesis is the <b><i>Place-Network</i></b>, a unit of analysis built to grasp elements of the social-environmental interactions of PAs. They are presented in their contexts represented in narratives to contrast the case studies. <i>Place-networks </i>and their <i>contexts</i> were drawn mainly from Actor-Network Theory (ANT), Social Network Analysis (SNA) and the anti-essentialist political ecology. The main findings of this thesis are related to three main outcomes. First, it provides a methodological approach to study the interface of the social and environmental components in PAs. Second, the relational tools of analysis applied allow observing continuity, centrality, knowledge and power as part of the process of configuration of social-environmental interactions in a given place and the meanings associated to them. Third, 'meanings' are the key features of social-environmental interactions; they emerge from both 'situated practice and knowledge' and from diffusion of global discourses within the Place-Networks. Therefore, <b><i>informed participation</i></b>, utilising the data that Place-Networks provides, is crucial to <b><i>negotiate </i></b>and <b><i>legitimise</i></b> 'meanings' and define the kind of social change and conservation 'desired' in PAs incorporating both, local and global meanings of places.
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