A guide for planners and managers - IUCN

Institutional and Legal
Framework
Modern protected areas were first established on land. Institutional and legal
frameworks originally were formulated to suit these land areas, first for national
parks and then for other types of protected areas. In many instances the same
approaches were applied to coastal and marine environments, with varying success,
and did not necessarily account for the particular aspects of marine resources. Among
these characteristics, Agardy (1997) identifies the fact that marine systems: are not
as well understood as terrestrial ones; have nebulous boundaries; exhibit wider
geographical and spatial scales in which environmentally induced changes are
common and almost immediate; are driven by largely changeable and unpredictable
processes; have largely unstructured food webs; are characterized by varying degrees
of linkage between communities of organisms in the water column and those of the
benthos; and are generally more non-linear than terrestrial systems. All these differences
point to the necessity ultimately of designing protected areas in marine and coastal
systems differently than terrestrial protected areas.
6.1 The Legal Basis of Coastal and Marine Protection
The establishment of a marine protected area more often than not requires the
drafting and adoption of appropriate supportive legislation. Marine area protection
has sometimes been accomplished through existing legislation that regulated other
uses; for example, programmes for marine fisheries, forestry (of mangroves), and land
use (of barrier islands and salt marshes). Yet, experience has shown that laws
established specifically for land areas do not usually address the specific characteristics
of marine and coastal environments, or the peculiarities of their use. It should be noted
that in the past some MPAs might have been set up before legislation was passed but