Marine protected areas have been scaling up from small areas located in coastal waters to large‐scale marine protected areas in remote areas, partly in response to the international agenda to conserve 10% of marine and coastal areas.
Chile has made considerable progress in the designation of large‐scale marine protected areas in its oceanic islands with varying degrees of top‐down and bottom‐up processes, scientific knowledge and interplay among institutions.
The process of designating the multiple‐uses marine protected area in Rapa Nui (Easter Island) involved interplay among scientific research, capacity building, local knowledge and collaboration between sectors, which contributed to the community transformation toward marine conservation in Rapa Nui.
A recent increase in scientific research on the marine ecosystems was transmitted to stakeholders and the local community via capacity‐building actions. The knowledge‐based empowerment of the Rapanui population (inhabitants of Rapa Nui) involved the definition not only of the objectives, the extension and the conservation goals of the Rapa Nui multiple‐uses marine protected area, but also of the implications beyond the designation, such as issues of governance, management and financing.
The implementation of the Rapa Nui multiple‐uses marine protected area will test local and Rapanui government relationships. The continuous science‐knowledge‐based dialogue in a strengthened relationship between the government and the local community in a ‘process of relating’ might be the pathway to future effective conservation efforts and successes.
1. Social-ecological system sustainability depends in part upon the fit between ecosystems and institutions. 2. In 2014, the local community on Easter Island started a bottom-up process to improve marine resources conservation and management.3. Local stakeholders formed a working group that has regular meetings and goals, such as creating a sea council and some basic action plans, thus initiating a local governance transformation process. 4. A participatory process was conducted together with a local organization that led the marine conservation issues on the island to define the factors that could favour and/or undermine the formation of the sea council. Also, the stakeholders that must be present in such a sea council were identified.5. Twelve factors that could facilitate or hinder the implementation of a sea council were identified. The lack of representativeness of public institutions is a major challenge.6. Public institutions are designed to ensure compliance with central government strategies, but the decisions do not represent the worldview of islanders.7. The results showed the potential value of conducting a participatory process to identify the key issues that could hinder or favour a desired governance transformation process. The participatory process also highlighted governance mismatches that are important to consider in attempts to pursue more effective fishery governance on Easter Island, and other Island communities.8. Centralized governance systems do not respond rapidly to locally observed social and ecological dynamics. By contrast, a local decision-making system based on traditional laws and local governance can more rapidly respond to observed changes. 9. The participatory process presented here holds the potential to support local people in their planning and coordination for marine conservation and management in order to optimize bottom-up change processes involving multiple stakeholders with different interests, values and levels of power.
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