Native People and Planning for Marine Protected Areas: How Stakeholder Processes Fail to Address Conflicts in Complex, Real-World Environments

Serious declines in fisheries around the world and marked deterioration in the overall health of marine ecosystems have been attracting great concern among scientists, environmentalists, and fishermen for more than a decade. Many marine ecologists and fisheries biologists have embraced marine protected areas (MPAs) as an appropriate policy prescription. Consistent with nearly all current environmental planning initiatives, collaborative stakeholder processes are the preferred method of designating and implementing MPAs. There are several problems with the way this model is conceptualized and operationalized, particularly as it pertains to aboriginal people: (1) proponents of MPAs and other marine conservation initiatives often focus on aggregate costs/benefits, without regard to distributive inequalities; (2) the prevailing assumption that all relevant stakeholders can be jointly incorporated into a collaborative process is misleading, given that there are significant differences in legal rights and other political capacities among the various stakeholders; (3) political institutions have a significant role in creating the different status of stakeholder groups, and thus shaping their interests, goals, capacities, and strategies. Two cases-MPA planning efforts in Washington State and in British Columbia-will be used to illustrate the argument, and in each case, I focus on how aboriginal groups are incorporated into both the immediate planning processes and the larger polity, and how a careful consideration of these factors and the effects they have on the groups' capacities to affect outcomes deepens our understanding of MPA design, implementation, and management.