Managing ecosystems for multiple ecosystem services and balancing the well-being of diverse stakeholders involves different kinds of trade-offs. Often trade-offs involve noneconomic and difficult-to-evaluate values, such as cultural identity, employment, the well-being of poor people, or particular species or ecosystem structures. Although trade-offs need to be considered for successful environmental management, they are often overlooked in favor of win-wins. Management and policy decisions demand approaches that can explicitly acknowledge and evaluate diverse trade-offs. We identified a diversity of apparent trade-offs in a small-scale tropical fishery when ecological simulations were integrated with participatory assessments of social-ecological system structure and stakeholders' well-being. Despite an apparent win-win between conservation and profitability at the aggregate scale, food production, employment, and well-being of marginalized stakeholders were differentially influenced by management decisions leading to trade-offs. Some of these trade-offs were suggested to be "taboo" trade-offs between morally incommensurable values, such as between profits and the well-being of marginalized women. These were not previously recognized as management issues. Stakeholders explored and deliberated over trade-offs supported by an interactive "toy model" representing key system trade-offs, alongside qualitative narrative scenarios of the future. The concept of taboo trade-offs suggests that psychological bias and social sensitivity may exclude key issues from decision making, which can result in policies that are difficult to implement. Our participatory modeling and scenarios approach has the potential to increase awareness of such trade-offs, promote discussion of what is acceptable, and potentially identify and reduce obstacles to management compliance.

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Conflicts between resource users and managers are common and well documented on Mafia Island (Tanzania), where there has been a history of unresolved conflict over marine conservation initiatives. The perceptions of fisheries and park restrictions among resource users and managers were evaluated to try to understand the underlying causes of these conflicts. Responses concerning management preferences of government officials employed by the Mafia Island Marine Park (MIMP), personnel of the fisheries department, and heads of households in three villages in and out of the Park were compared. The largest differences in perceptions were found between villagers and managers, but all respondents agreed that minimum fish lengths and gear restrictions were beneficial and that benefits increased along the scale of the individual-community-national government. Villagers and government officials differed most in their perceptions towards areabased management, spatial and temporal closures, and species restrictions. Perceptions of management restrictions and benefits were only weakly correlated with the socioeconomic status of the villagers, but more strongly correlated with their living in or out of the Park and their family's economic options. The most negative perceptions towards restrictions were found in villages near fisheries closures, where there was a heavy reliance on marine resources and a higher numbers of jobs per household, but less reliance on cash crops, animal husbandry and tourism. The lack of these three options appears to have produced lower levels of support for MIMP and associated restrictions, and might be overcome by (1) using gear and minimum size restrictions more than fisheries closures and (2) increasing access to tourism, cash crops, animal husbandry and salaried employment, rather than simply increasing livelihood diversity.

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The linkage between ecosystems and human well-being is a focus of the conceptualization of "ecosystem services" as promoted by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. However, the actual nature of connections between ecosystems and the well-being of individuals remains complex and poorly understood. We conducted a series of qualitative focus groups with five different stakeholder groups connected to a small-scale Kenyan coastal fishery to understand (1) how well-being is understood within the community, and what is important for well-being, (2) how people's well-being has been affected by changes over the recent past, and (3) people's hopes and aspirations for their future fishery. Our results show that people conceive well-being in a diversity of ways, but that these can clearly map onto the MA framework. In particular, our research unpacks the "freedoms and choices" element of the framework and argues for greater recognition of these aspects of well-being in fisheries management in Kenya through, for example, more participatory governance processes.

Achieving high compliance with resource-use management policies is a critical concern to achieving sustainability, particularly in poor countries. Willingness to comply may depend on the values and perceptions of benefits and legitimacy of the restrictions. Consequently, we interviewed and evaluated the perceptions of fishing restrictions among~2100 marine fisheries stakeholders (resource users and managers) in 102 fishing villages in Kenya, Madagascar, Mozambique and Tanzania. We hypothesized that perceived benefits would decline and social inequity increase along a hypothesized gradient of increasing access restriction -ranging from minimum size of fish to fisheries closures. Managers did not recognize the hypothesized access restriction gradient, seeing most restrictions as beneficial, but with some nation-specific distinctions. Village-level responses of resource users varied by country, and overall perceived benefits of access restrictions increased with the wealth, education and membership in fishing organizations. In Kenya and Tanzania, some communities with views that differed greatly from managers were, in places, found near marine protected areas and they perceived more benefits accruing to the government than resource users for the strongest access restrictions. Madagascar and Mozambique fishing villages had low between-community variability, and their responses did not reflect the hypothesized restriction gradient or strong social disparity, which may reflect limited practical experience with restrictions. These results suggest that countries with stronger central governments contained villages with more between-community variability and perceived social disparity than weaker governments. We argue that transparent negotiations with stakeholders about the scales of costs and benefits should increase compliance with selected fisheries regulations.

SUMMARYIncreasing the chances that resource users engage in and comply with management regulations is a continual problem for many conservation initiatives globally. This is particularly common when resource users perceive more personal costs than benefits from specific management actions. Analysis of interviews with managers and fishers from 22 landing sites along the coast of Kenya indicated how key stakeholders perceived the scale of benefits and costs from different management strategies. Potential underlying causes of divergent perceptions towards different management tools were evaluated, including marine protected areas, no-take fisheries closures, gear use, minimum size of fish caught and species restrictions. The analysis identified three distinct opinion groups: (1) a group of nine landing sites that scaled their preference for most management restrictions neutral to low, with exceptions for minimum sizes of captured fish and gear restrictions; (2) a group of eight landing sites that scaled their preference for the above and species restrictions and closed season higher, and were more neutral about closures and marine protected areas; and (3) a group containing four landing sites and the managers’ offices that rated their preference for the above and closed areas and marine protected areas as high. Logistic regression was used to examine whether these groups differed in wealth, education, age, perceptions of disparity in benefits, dependence on fishing and distance to government marine protected areas. The most frequent significant factor was the resource users’ perceived disparity between the benefits of the management to themselves and their communities, with the benefits to the government. Consequently, efforts to reduce this real or perceived disparity are likely to increase adoption and compliance rates. Most widespread positively-viewed restrictions, such as gear use and minimum size of fish, should be promoted at the national level while other restrictions may be more appropriately implemented at the community level.

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