Understanding and integrating socioeconomic factors into the design and management of marine protected areas

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are a key strategy employed worldwide to mitigate biodiversity loss and maintain marine ecosystem services. However, the efficacy of MPAs in achieving biological and socioeconomic goals is highly variable; a significant factor impeding their success is a lack of consideration and understanding of associated human systems. This is particularly true for MPAs designed under Systematic Conservation Planning (SCP), currently the foremost paradigm employed in the design of protected areas. Despite a flurry of activity in the SCP literature advocating the need to better understand and incorporate socioeconomic factors into design and management of protected areas, in practice, socioeconomic factors continue to be oversimplified and treated as secondary to biological factors. Given the ongoing expansion of MPAs globally, there is a pressing need to better understand and incorporate socioeconomic factors into design and management. The overarching goal of my thesis is to improve our understanding of critical socioeconomic factors relevant to MPAs, and to provide guidance on how this knowledge can be incorporated into MPA design and management. I set out to achieve this goal through three research objectives, which are to: 1. Investigate the socioeconomic impacts of MPAs, and whether these vary according to social subgroup 2. Identify socioeconomic factors related to individual participation of local people in MPA management 3. Test alternative approaches to incorporating socioeconomic factors into spatial prioritisation of MPAs under a SCP approach. The first objective of my thesis seeks to contribute to building the evidence base for the socioeconomic impacts of protected areas, which is currently weak, particularly in relation to whether impacts differ according to social subgroups. I address this objective by assessing the short-, medium- and long-term impacts of a MPA project on three key domains of poverty (i.e. security, opportunity, and empowerment) over fifteen years (chapter 2), ...