Governability of marine protected areas: The effect of trade-offs, hybrid patterns, and policy implications in Cenderawasih Bay National Park, Indonesia

Abstract

This paper describes how to integrate and harmonize governability that is built on the dimensions of the governance system, system to be governed, and interactive governance. This form of integration often causes trade offs between governability (interdimensional), resulting in one of the systems more likely to have a more prominent role than other systems. This condition is often overlooked in the current management activities. Harmonization between dimensions of governance is done to synergize the roles of each dimension’s attributes to achieve good governance in reaching the objectives of the management. In a hybrid pattern (an integration between governance system and systems to be governed), the interactive governance process could be achieved through an adaptive and responsive management, and monitoring and evaluation, as well as regulatory aspects and involvement of the stakeholders as prime movers of the processes in all phases of management. This is especially important for areas without explicit customary marine management traditions where the emergent nonformal institutional set-up needs to fill a particularly large void in the nonformal adaptive core within the formal MPA framework governance. In this context, even effective rules which achieve undesirable outcomes need to be examined for underlying rationales and incentives.