Integrating socio-economic monitoring at coastal management sites in the Western Indian Ocean. | Proceedings of the Workshop on a Regional Perspective on MPAs in the Western Indian Ocean, Rodrigues Island, Mauritius, 9-14 May 2007.

Coral reefs form the basis of the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people in the Western Indian Ocean (WIO) region with numerous poor coastal households depending very highly on marine resources. Coral reefs are often an economic resource of last resort for food and income, through extractive uses such as fishing. Coral reefs are also important for their non-extractive uses such as tourism, Climate change, destructive fishing, sand mining, pollution, and other human activities threaten coral reefs in the WIO region. Various approaches including Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) and Integrated Coastal Management (ICM) have been used along the coasts of the WIO to try and mitigate threats to marine biodiversity and to improve fisheries management. However, marine resources management is as much about managing resource users’ attitudes and behaviour as the resources themselves. Thus to manage resources effectively, it is essential to understand the context within which marine resource users live, their livelihood constraints and opportunities. It is increasingly recognised in the region that for resource management to be effective in the long term, MPA and fisheries management need to adapt and respond to changes in marine resource users’ socioeconomic context. The Socio-economic Monitoring Initiative for Coastal Managers of the Western Indian Ocean (SocMon WIO) aims to increase the capacity of coastal managers to understand and incorporate the socio-economic context into coastal management programmes. SocMon WIO is a regional programme that builds on local-level monitoring systems. It is based on community members’ participation and is implemented at the local level by projects, marine protected area authorities, local area management authorities, fisheries officers or community groups. The SocMon WIO network expanded to 12 sites across the region in 2007. The sites include nine managed MPAs, three of these being ICM/Comanagement sites. One is an East Africa Marine Ecoregion sites of regional importance (WWF-EAME). This paper presents the experience of SocMon in the WIO since 2002, the challenges encountered, and how these were addressed.

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