Capacity building and community involvement in marine protected area implementation

The local-community of resource users in the area of the Marine Protected Areas (MPA) needs to be enlisted as a co-management partner in its siting, planning, implementation and operation through a "bottom-up" approach. Experience has shown that the imposition of MPAs without broad participation, consensus and acceptability is a recipe for failure. However, not all resource users have the appropriate local institutions and skills for co-management, thus any co-management. arrangement for an MPA will require both institution- and capacity-building. This paper presents factors related to capacity building and community involvement that can lead to the successful planning and implementation of MPAs.