Ownership arrangements may vary too. The protected areas of Biosphere Reserves are mostly public land, but may also be privately owned or belong to non-governmental organizations. In many cases, the area of managed use is in community or private ownership, and this is generally the case for the transition area. No sovereignty is yielded in the case of private lands. Establishing a Biosphere Reserve obviously poses an enormous challenge, namely to set up an appropriate mechanism, for instance a Committee, to plan and co-ordinate all the activities that will take place there.
Management needs to be open, evolving and adaptive.
Such an approach requires perseverance, patience and imagination. But it will allow the local community to be better placed to respond to external political, economic and social pressures, which would affect the ecological and cultural values of the area.