The rise of large-scale marine protected areas: Conservation or geopolitics?

Protected areas in Chile: are we managing them?

“…Continental Chile has large coastal cities, fishing, mining and salmon farming, among other heavy-impact economical activities, which makes conservation of biodiversity an extremely difficult task [32]. Leenhardt et al [19] suggested that large-scale marine protected areas (LSMPAs) became a popular conservation tool for governments during the last decade due to their appearance as a solution for reaching conservation targets. This, combined with the low level of use compared to continents, make oceanic ecoregions the best candidates for reaching the 10% global target even though representativeness is low.…”

“…Following this declaration, the number of PAs increased in the subsequent years to the present, resulting in more than 10 million km 2 of MPAs worldwide and a 360% growth in only 10 years [1,18,19,22,33]. For example, the 1.1 million-km 2 Marae Moana: Cook Islands Marine Park, which was created in 2012, as well as the 1.3 million-km 2 Parc naturel de la mer de Corail in 2014 and the more recent (2015) 500,000-km 2 Palau National Marine Sanctuary.…”

Large-Scale Marine Protected Areas: guidelines for design and management

“…When this is not done, LSMPA managers may find themselves inadvertently at odds with their own community or in direct conflict with those holding legal rights or legitimate interests in the lands or waters of the site. The designation of an LSMPA may be perceived as a loss of inherent cultural rights to conduct certain activities in the site's waters (Leenhardt, et al, 2013). Even where limiting access does not infringe on existing livelihoods, management decisions based on science can infringe upon or misappropriate the rights and knowledge of Indigenous peoples.…”

Understanding How Policy Actors Improvise and Collaborate in the Great Barrier Reef

“…Participation improves the legitimacy of MPA agreements, implementation, and enforcement, particularly across sovereign borders (Leenhardt et al 2013). Policy actors can constrain financial resources, and administrative and legal capacities, severely limiting implementation (Ferraro et al 2011;Gerhardinger et al 2011;Jentoft et al 2012;Ramirez 2016;Sandstr€ om et al 2016).…”

“…Marine policy that pays limited attention to local displacement problems, for example, can create the perception that some resource users are unfairly singled out (Agardy, di Sciara, and Christie 2011). Rather than resolving conservation problems, poorly contextualized policy can in fact exacerbate conflict and compliance issues (Agardy, di Sciara, and Christie 2011;Agardy, Claudet, and Day 2016), and prohibit conservation outcomes across diverse coastal and marine contexts (National Research Council Staff 2001;Warner and Pomeroy 2012;Leenhardt et al 2013). Contextualization problems are acute in large sites involving diverse socio-political, economic, and institutional values and processes Ban et al 2017;Mitchell 2017).…”