Towards local governance of marine resources and ecosystems on Easter Island

Abstract

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.

Spatial and seasonal differences in the top predators of Easter Island: Essential data for implementing the new Rapa Nui multiple‐uses marine protected area

“…Several initiatives have proposed other strategies to protect marine coastal and offshore ecosystems at Easter Island. An effort has been made in the last 7 years to raise awareness and capacity building in the Rapa Nui community (Aburto, Gaymer, & Cundill, ; Gaymer et al, ). These efforts ultimately resulted in a participatory process that led to the creation of a MUMPA around the entire EEZ of Easter and Salas y Gómez islands, completing the protection initially provided by the Motu Motiro Hiva Marine Park in 2010— see Toonen et al () and Wilhelm et al () regarding this marine park.…”

Why people matter in ocean governance: Incorporating human dimensions into large-scale marine protected areas

“…However, over recent years there has been increasing attention to how to design and manage LSMPAs [33,57] including how to incorporate HD considerations [10,57]. In particular, attention has been paid to the integration of cultural considerations [31], the challenges of enforcement [23,58], creation of effective and adaptive management [12,59,60], the establishment of effective governance regimes [32,61,62], the merging of top-down and bottom up processes during the design phase [63,64] and the management of social impacts [26].…”

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].…”

“…We recognize that there are numerous examples of positive marine conservation initiatives that incorporate participatory planning processes [34][35][36][37], that have taken into account social and cultural considerations [38,39], that consider livelihoods and are co-managed [40][41][42][43], that recognize local and indigenous community initiatives to conserve local resources [25,35,44], and that have produced positive social outcomes to the benefit of natural resource management efforts [45][46][47][48]. Furthermore, generally speaking, there is good will within the international community to consider the concerns and needs of people when designing conservation actions.…”