Performance and Obstacle Tracking to Natural Forest Resource Protection Project: A Rangers’ Case of Qilian Mountain, China

Forests play an important role in the process of land degradation and restoration. As a national key ecological project for protecting natural forest, the natural forest resource protection project was implemented in 17 provinces for nearly 20 years. As the core stakeholders and main force for protecting forest resources, rangers have a clear, more objective and comprehensive perception of the policy process, problems and forest ecological changes than farmers. This study introduces public value theory, builds a performance evaluation system that combines the “process-outcome” of ecological construction and uses the GRA-TOPSIS and obstacle tracking model to investigate the performance and obstacle factor of natural forest resource protection project from rangers’ perspective. GRA-TOPSIS is an optimal sequence technique for ideal solution optimization that combines the gray correlation method. The empirical results showed the overall performance of the natural forest resource protection project is good, the relative gray closeness that indicated the process dimension value of the natural forest resource protection project (NFRPP) is 0.663 which higher than the outcome dimension. It reflected the characterization and value level of overall and dimensions performance of NFRPP in Qilian Mountain. The rangers’ support evaluation is the highest, followed by the ecological outcome, sustainability and stability. The key obstacle is the support of local farmers, the social and economic outcome of the project. The natural forest resource protection project has shortcomings in its management system, function setting and support mechanism and urgently improved it from the resource system, resource unit, management system and user. These results are important to promote better implementation of such ecological projects, to enhance the project stability and the regional sustainable development.