The world’s more than 200 000 protected areas comein many forms, on land and at sea, and occur in everycountry (Bertzky et al. 2012). They are places that peopleestablish to conserve natural and cultural heritage andto sustain their benefits for society. Among other values,protected areas allow people to connect with nature fortheir inspiration, education, wellbeing and recreation.While protecting ecosystems that are essential for life,they can support human livelihoods and aspirationsand offer nature-based solutions for the complexchallenges faced by the world today. Contemporarysystems of protected areas include a great variety ofareas established over generations by diverse actors andfor many purposes, yet they have some very importantfeatures in common, regardless of their origins or theirdirection. The International Union for Conservation ofNature (IUCN) definition of a protected area creates acommon framework for understanding the essence ofthe governance and management regimes that are atthe heart of every protected area as a ‘clearly definedgeographical space, recognised, dedicated and managed,through legal or other effective means, to achievethe long-term conservation of nature with associatedecosystem services and cultural values’ (Dudley 2008:8).This book has been prepared as a contribution to theIUCN World Parks Congress in Sydney in 2014. Theglobal community is at the interface of ensuring thequality of protected area governance and management,together with the way that effectively managed andequitably governed protected areas systems can supportsociety to meet current and future challenges. Resourcesthat support capacity development are a crucialcomponent of the value chain to enable competentprofessionals and effective institutions to achievesatisfactory outcomes. It is our hope that this learningresource will be an excellent foundation for the majorenterprise in capacity development that must follow—one of the important outcomes of the IUCN WorldParks Congress contributing to ‘The Promise of Sydney’.