Marine Protected Areas as conservation imaginaries?

Abstract

Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are imagined to be nature-based solution towards climate change (CC) adaptation and mitigation. In a landmark agreement from December 2022 at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference COP15, the international community has committed to massively increase and enlarge marine protected areas (MPAs) to 30 percent surface coverage by 2030. The agreement was signed by 195 countries and has met little resistance. Yet the effectiveness of these areas with regard to both nature conservation and their efforts towards CC adaptation and mitigation has been strongly contested. At the same time, MPAs are often blamed to exclude local resource users and disregard regulations in place prior to MPA establishment. While the static MPA borders in a dynamic ocean attempt to keep harmful human practices out, these borders are ignored by non-humans, also by consequences of climate change. Analyzing the tensions and interactions of MPAs as conservation imaginaries across scales, from the international agreement to locally embedded realities, opens up opportunities for critical engagement with the tool. Applying a governmentality lens, a qualitative content analysis of international level documents released through and after COP15 is juxtaposed with experiences from explorative field visits across four MPAs in Indonesia and the Dutch Caribbean. These coastal MPAs, situated in marine biodiversity hotspots, reveal impacts of international level imaginaries and their limits on the local level. They make visible the gap between the “world conveyed in these texts and the world to be transformed” (Li 2007:21).