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 naive or overly narrow decision rules can lead to inefficient MPA designs that miss economic and conservation opportunities.

Keywords

Additionality; Bio-economic model; Enforcement; Leakage; Nash equilibrium; No-take reserves; Park effectiveness; Reserve site selection; Spatial prioritization; Systematic conservation planning; Marine spatial planning

Published in

Environmental and Resource Economics
2020, Volume: 77, number: 1, pages: 229-269
ISBN: 15731502 09246460

Sustainable Development Goals

SDG14 Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development
SDG1 End poverty in all its forms everywhere


UKÄ Subject classification

Economics


Publication identifier

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-020-00472-7

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/113774