Untangling worldwide conflicts in marine protected areas: Five lessons from the five continents

Abstract

As the number of world Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) has been steadily increasing in the last decades, confrontations within them may have followed the same path. In order to unravel worldwide conservation conflicts in MPAs, a literature review was done. By doing so, five lessons were learnt: (1) 87 MPAs in the five continents have reported conflicts in the literature; (2) The increase in the number of world MPAs was found to be one of the forces driving this trend; (3) Intergroup competition over the use of marine resources, feelings of exclusion, poor communication and inequities in the distribution of MPA’ benefits were the most frequent conflicts; (4) Conflict resolution strategies were scarce in the literature and displayed different outcomes; (5) To effectively address conflict and reach compromise, the roots of disputes should be identified. Further research on the effectiveness of different conflict resolution mechanisms is needed.