Linking social organization, attitudes, and stakeholder empowerment in MPA governance

The last two decades has seen a global trend in Marine Protected Area (MPA) management from top-down to more bottom-up approaches. Moreover, recent research suggests that evaluation of MPA performance should be participative, fully engaging multiple stakeholders, including local community representatives, in the assessment process. The effectiveness of such an approach to evaluation will be largely dependent on the stakeholders' level of awareness and knowledge of MPA governance principles, though this has rarely been systematically investigated. Here, we assess the capacity of diverse MPA stakeholders to evaluate their MPA using data from interviews with MPA managers, fishers, representatives of the local government and others. We used structured questionnaires to evaluate the level of consensus in attitudes among stakeholders from groups with different levels of social organization. We found that there was significantly low consensus among local community stakeholder groups and high among managers. Our findings also suggest that governance principles are holistically assessed on participative evaluations involving all main stakeholders involved. Based on our results, we propose a participative framework for governance assessment to facilitate the identification of convergence (consensus) and divergence (conflicts) among stakeholder groups.