Abstract
The design of protected areas, whether marine or terrestrial, rarely considers how people respond to the imposition of no-take sites with complete or incomplete enforcement. Consequently, these protected areas may fail to achieve their intended goal. We present and solve a spatial bio-economic model in which a manager chooses the optimal location, size, and enforcement level of a marine protected area (MPA). This manager acts as a Stackelberg leader, and her choices consider villagers’ best response to the MPA in a spatial Nash equilibrium of fishing site and effort decisions. Relevant to lower income country settings but general to other settings, we incorporate limited enforcement budgets, distance costs of traveling to fishing sites, and labor allocation to onshore wage opportunities. The optimal MPA varies markedly across alternative manager goals and budget sizes, but always induce changes in villagers’ decisions as a function of distance, dispersal, and wage. We consider MPA managers with ecological conservation goals and with economic goals, and identify the shortcomings of several common manager decision rules, including those focused on: (1) fishery outcomes rather than broader economic goals, (2) fish stocks at MPA sites rather than across the full marinescape, (3) absolute levels rather than additional values, and (4) costless enforcement. Our results demonstrate that such naïve or overly narrow decision rules can lead to inefficient MPA designs that miss economic and conservation opportunities.
Highlights
Many countries are expanding their protected area (PA) networks, terrestrial and marine, to achieve both ecological goals, which often align with international conservation agreements (Pereira et al 2013), and economic goals (Gaines et al 2010; Jentoft et al 2011), which often prioritize sustainable resource management for the benefit of nearby resource-dependentExtended author information available on the last page of the article communities (Cabral et al 2019; Carr et al 2019)
To predict how villagers react to an marine protected area (MPA), we develop a game-theoretic model in which villagers make individual fishing site and labor effort decisions that aggregate through a Nash equilibrium with spatially explicit micro-foundations
Much of the fishery policy and fishery economics literature focuses on how policies such as MPAs improve yield and fishery profits
Summary
Many countries are expanding their protected area (PA) networks, terrestrial and marine, to achieve both ecological goals, which often align with international conservation agreements (Pereira et al 2013), and economic goals (Gaines et al 2010; Jentoft et al 2011), which often prioritize sustainable resource management for the benefit of nearby resource-dependentExtended author information available on the last page of the article communities (Cabral et al 2019; Carr et al 2019). Working from the opposite starting point, we use a model of villagers’ fishing site and labor decisions to predict how villagers react to a marine protected area (MPA), and incorporate these villager best responses into optimal MPA design to determine the optimal size, location, and enforcement of an MPA intended to maximize either ecological or economic objectives. By modeling fixed distance costs of traveling to each potential fishing site, we incorporate the spatial interactions between fishers’ site choice and managers’ MPA size, sites, and enforcement decisions (Robinson et al 2014; Madrigal-Ballestero et al 2017). Acting as a Stackelberg leader and to maximize a specific goal, our manager chooses the optimal size, sites, and enforcement level considering villagers’ spatial equilibrium best responses to the MPA
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
