Stakeholder Participation in Marine Reserve Planning and

Management in the Wider Caribbean

Through an interdisciplinary analysis of marine reserves in the wider Caribbean, this research examines factors critical to successful governance of coupled social and ecological systems and explores relationships among these factors. In this study, an integrated team consisting of a marine policy scientist, an ecologist, and an anthropologist together with several research assistants is conducting a systematic survey of governance factors at thirty marine reserves in the wider Caribbean. For each marine reserve and its associated communities, we use research techniques developed in the fields of cultural anthropology and marine ecology to conduct a rapid appraisal of the social, institutional, organizational, and biological conditions of the area.

In our first field season (June-August 2006), we visited nine marine reserve sites and 19 communities in Belize and Honduras. We conducted 518 structured surveys with individuals who live in communities associated with marine reserves, over 55 semi-structured interviews with key informants, 180 benthic and coral transect surveys, 68 roving fish counts, and 330 fish transect surveys. In this presentation, I will describe the overall project and present preliminary results related to stakeholder participation in reserve planning and management. These results highlight the complex nature of stakeholder participation in the governance of coupled social and ecological systems.