Merging top‐down and bottom‐up approaches in marine protected areas planning: experiences from around the globe

Abstract

ABSTRACT1. Five case studies from around the world illustrate key lessons in integrating top-down and bottom-up approaches to stakeholder and community engagement in the planning and implementation of marine protected areas (MPAs).2. Community resistance to MPA proposals from centralized agencies can be addressed through effective participatory processes with consistent engagement over time, transparency, and the incorporation of benefits for communities.3. Indigenous communities in particular are becoming key actors of some conservation initiatives (e.g. MPAs) and recognition of their inherent rights, traditional knowledge and deep connections to the marine environment can become the foundations for collaborative management of MPAs.4. True participation requires empowerment for engagement, and this in turn requires education and capacity building for local people to get involved in the process of planning, implementing, and managing MPAs.5. How bottom-up and top-down approaches are used should consider the scale of the MPA (e.g. small vs. large), the geographic scenario (e.g. coastal vs. remote), the level of anthropogenic influence, the conservation objectives (e.g. species, habitats, ecosystems), the political and governance context, and specific cultural conditions, such as the presence of indigenous communities.

An appeal for a code of conduct for marine conservation

“…For example, recent accounts have documented marine conservation initiatives that lack consultation or consent prior to implementation [14][15][16], fail to account for the rights and needs of local people [17][18][19], physically displace communities [20,21], produce inequitable social impacts [22][23][24], disempower local communities [25,26] and undermine traditional and functioning resource management regimes [27]. These issues have led some scholars and practitioners to question whether some marine conservation initiatives should be labeled as a form of "ocean grabbing" when governance processes are poor or when rights and resources are taken from small-scale fishers, indigenous peoples, and/or coastal communities [28,29].…”

Environmental governance: A practical framework to guide design, evaluation, and analysis

“…A culture of innovation, coupled with a higher risk tolerance, encourages experimentation with new ideas and the monitoring and documentation of successes and failures to enable effective management actions to emerge (Chaffin et al, 2016;Dietz et al, 2003). Rather than promoting one-size-fits-all approaches, flexibility in institutions and policies allows for the calibrating of environmental management and conservation models to diverse local realities (Epstein et al, 2015;Gaymer et al, 2014). This requires that efforts are made to understand and document the social, cultural, political, economic.…”

How Marine Protected Areas Are Governed: A Cultural Theory Perspective

“…Hence, it is likely that they will be more effective in managing access to resources through local arrangements [68]. Scholars have listed numerous benefits of community-based resource management, such as increasing local people's acceptance and participation, improvement of the local economy, as well as a deepening of democratization [69][70][71]. However, in places with long histories of state-centric policies, community-based resource management initiatives are likely to face important challenges [5], in particular in relation with their minimization of differences in resource managers' status and power.…”