Can Habitat Protection Lead to Improvements in Human Well-Being? Evidence from Marine Protected Areas in the Philippines

From measuring outcomes to providing inputs: Governance, management, and local development for more effective marine protected areas

“…However, a lack of testing for additionality -i.e., measuring the impact of an activity or intervention through comparison with a status quo metric or reference case -does not ensure that these benefits are causally related to the MPA and not just mirroring outside changes. For many MPAs, though, the level of local involvement in tourism may be minimal due to outside ownership, centralization and leakage of profits, outside hiring, lack of mechanisms for benefit sharing, and lack of local capacity [16,54,[72][73][74][75]. If local communities are not benefiting from tourism, it is likely to widen pre-existing inequalities and it may even lead to increased fishing effort.…”

“…Other potential alternative livelihood strategies include agriculture, raising livestock, aquaculture, mariculture, seaweed farming, beekeeping, handicrafts, tree nurseries, and pearl farming [72,73,[77][78][79][80]. Tapping into Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) markets, which provide economic incentives to stakeholders for managing the environment to provide various ecological services, might also provide an incentive for local conservation while providing an alternative livelihood option.…”

“…Ecological services, such as coastal protection, may also lead to reduced vulnerability and improved household security. Yet MPAs and related developments can also lead to contrary socio-economic outcomes, including increased conflict and political struggle, exacerbated vulnerabilities, negative sociocultural change, increased restrictions, decreased levels of power and alienation in natural resource management processes, forced migration, loss of assets, increased social tension, loss of social and educational facilities, inequitable distribution of benefits, further marginalization of marginalized groups, loss of tenure, as well as decreased food security in the short term and for some groups [10,16,41,43,50,53,54,65,69,[72][73][74][75]88,89,91,93,[95][96][97][98][99][100]. In short, livelihood and socio-economic outcomes from MPAs vary widely and can range from very positive to very negative depending on the context and inputs.…”

“…Benefits from tourism may also require negotiation of local access rights, policies that ensure benefits are accrued locally, and policies that do not undermine local land ownership [54,75,97]. Macro level normative and policy support for sustainable local development in MPA communities is needed both in national governments and in international conservation organizations [72,100,127].…”

“…De Santo [22] suggests that with agreements to establish MPAs in 10% of the ocean [23], quality is being lost in the push towards quantity and more attention needs to be given to achieving successful outcomes for conservation and local communities [10,24,25]. As noted by Gjertsen [26] "Disentangling the factors that contribute to effective conservation and improved human welfare is difficult, but necessary for understanding when these win-win scenarios are likely to emerge". Yet the majority of research on management effectiveness has been on measuring impacts and outcomes rather than identifying input variables that produce effective MPAs and proposing solutions [27].…”