Marine Protected Areas in the Canary Islands – Improving Their Governability

MPAs are complex institutional arrangements that should be analyzed from a governance perspective taking into account the serious challenges posed about their capacity to cope with the problems of implementation or effectiveness. In this paper we emphasize the huge and diverse advantages of MPAs initiated by local communities. This trend is increasing lately with the involvement and demands of traditional users, such as artisanal fishers, requesting the implementation of marine reserves. Frequently, they want to ensure the sustainability of fishing activities and avoid the pitfalls of rising numbers of other users. In Spain, many of the latest proposals for Marine Reserves (MRs) were designed for this purpose by local fishers’ organizations in partnership with biologists and social scientists, and some of these initiatives learned precisely from the inception process of La Restinga MPA, the case we are analyzing in detail here.