Optimal siting, sizing, and enforcement of marine protected areas

Heidi Albers, L. Preonas, Tabaré Capitán, Elizabeth Robinson () and R. Madrigal-Ballestero

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

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.

Keywords: additionality; bio-economic model; enforcement; leakage; marine spatial planning; Nash equilibrium; no-take reserves; park effectiveness; reserve site selection; spatial prioritization; systematic conservation planning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J01 R14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41 pages
Date: 2020-09-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env and nep-gth
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Environmental and Resource Economics, 1, September, 2020, 77(1), pp. 229 - 269. ISSN: 0924-6460

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/113552/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Optimal Siting, Sizing, and Enforcement of Marine Protected Areas (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:113552

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().