Community-Based Governance in Marine Protected Areas

Community-based governance in marine protected areas represents a paradigm shift from top-down conservation to participatory models that place local stakeholders at the heart of planning, decision-making and enforcement. By integrating traditional ecological knowledge with scientific monitoring, this approach seeks to align biodiversity conservation with the socio-economic wellbeing of adjacent communities. Empirical evidence indicates that when fishers, customary leaders and civil-society groups share authority over zoning, surveillance and benefit distribution, ecological indicators such as fish biomass and habitat complexity tend to improve, while social outcomes—including livelihood resilience, a sense of stewardship and conflict mitigation—are substantially enhanced. Such governance arrangements advance equity by embedding procedural justice and recognition of marginalised groups, and they contribute to the fulfilment of global biodiversity targets under the Kunming–Montreal Framework and Sustainable Development Goals. Although challenges persist in reconciling local autonomy with national regulatory regimes, securing long-term financing and navigating competing ocean uses, emerging practices in co-production of knowledge and adaptive leadership offer practical pathways to scale community-centred MPAs across diverse coastal regions.

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Community-Based Governance in Marine Protected Areas publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in community-based governance in marine protected areas across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Community-based governance: A management approach that places local stakeholders at the core of decision-making processes in protected areas.

Co-management: A shared governance arrangement between communities and formal authorities to manage natural resources.

Bayesian network: A probabilistic graphical model representing variables and their conditional dependencies to support decision making under uncertainty.

Multiple-use MPA: A marine protected area zoned to allow sustainable resource use alongside conservation objectives.

References

1. Socio-economic factors boosting the effectiveness of marine protected areas: A Bayesian network analysis. Ecological Informatics (2024).
2. Small-scale fisheries in ecologically sensitive areas in Latin America and the Caribbean: Do marine protected areas benefit fisheries governance?. Ambio (2024).
3. Exploring local public support for protected areas: What social factors influence stated and active support among local people?. Environmental Science & Policy (2023).