The establishment of a national park system is of great significance to the reform of the protected area scheme and the construction of ecological civilization in China. However, the development of national parks has been confronted with a series of challenges such as institutional innovation, natural resource registration, and legal system perfection. Learning from the advanced experience of other countries will help identify the gap between the current situation and the best standard while revealing weaknesses in the development and management of national parks, thereby promoting the exploration of optimized modes of construction and management for national parks in China. For this reason, this report systematically summarized the experience and best practices of national park management in different countries. Combining international best practices and China's requirements on national park construction, this report proposes an indicator system to evaluate the management capacity of national parks. The system contains a total of 18 indicators comprising five aspects:institutional construction, guarantee mechanism, natural resources and environment management, community management, and popular science and education. The highest standard of each indicator was then defined according to the best practice and a comprehensive method of evaluating national park management capacity was put forward. This method used the analytic hierarchy process and expert scoring method to determine the weight and the score of each indicator. A comprehensive score of national park management capacity was obtained by adding up the weighted score of each indicator. In the short term, this methodology based on best practices will aid in assessing the management basis and construction potential of pilot national parks in China, providing scientific guidance for the selection of national parks. In the long term, it will lay a foundation for establishing a methodology to evaluate the effectiveness of national park management, thereby providing technical support to improve the management capacity of national parks in China.