ORGANIZATIONAL AND STRATEGIC PROFILES OF MARINE PROTECTED AREAS: SOME CASE STUDIES IN THE ADRIATIC AND IONIAN REGION

Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are increasingly regarded as valuable tools aimed at both achieving marine conservation and resource management goals. They are also basic instruments for the ecosystem-based management approach adopted to mitigate the multitude of threats affecting coastal and marine ecosystems and the services they provide to humankind. Available evidences from a number of case studies worldwide confirm that MPAs may play an important role in recovering marine communities and ecosystems and in enhancing fishing stocks and also related revenues to fishermen. Such successes explain the high increase of the number of MPAs, a number that now exceeds 11,300 on a worldwide scale (Marine Conservation Institute, 2015). Although on average MPAs exhibit positive effects, the magnitude (and occasionally also the direction) of responses to protection can vary dramatically The sources of this variability in MPAs’ performance are numerous and, in some cases, quite well studied. Key issues that have been documented include the level of enforcement, social compliance, MPA size, age, location and fishing regulations. A significant portion of the variability of MPA effectiveness, however, still remains unexplained, which suggests the need to explore more in depth other aspects possibly affecting MPA performance. Some areas ripe for exploration are, for instance, the goals that each MPA have set and the organizational activities undertaken to achieve such goals. Exploring these institutional characteristics and their influence on MPA performance requires bringing new perspectives and tools from other disciplines to MPA analyses. Organization Science (hereafter OS) studies the structures, processes, practices, culture, knowledge and other organizational variables and supplies tools to carry out organizations’ performance analysis. Protected Areas can be seen as social-ecological systems (SESs), established and often managed by public and/or no-profit organizations. MPAs, therefore, can be considered as “organizational systems” whose effectiveness can be influenced by their own organizational dimensions. Although the analysis of the organizational aspects of MPAs is a new approach still in its infancy the tools provided by OS may provide important insights to analyze and potentially improve MPA performance. The aim of the study is 1) to assess the putative variability in organizational and strategic profiles of three Mediterranean MPAs used here as case studies and 2) to suggest possible indications aimed at improving MPA organizational asset and related effectiveness