A guide for planners and managers - IUCN

PART I
Institutional and Legal Framework
fishing boats and no motor boats are allowed in the park. Another successful park
was also established in the south of the country in the Parc National du Diawling.
Broader national legislation is currently being drafted by the Government of Mauritania,
and encompasses a Coastal Zone Management plan that includes a zoning scheme,
built around the two parks, buffer zones and other areas to which industrial uses
(mining, shipping and industrial fishing) are limited. This represents a case where
the parks were practically set up twenty years before the broader, more encompassing
legislation was enacted.
6.6 International Tools for MPAs
Treaties that provide for protected areas in the marine environment are few. They can
be grouped in two categories. First, some treaties are primarily designed to provide
for protected areas on land, but can also be applied to marine areas under the
jurisdiction of their parties. These include the Ramsar Convention of 1971 (the
Convention on Wetlands of International Importance Especially as Waterfowl Habitat)
and the World Heritage Convention of 1972, and regional treaties, such as the African
Convention on Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources of 1968, the Convention
on Nature Protection and Wildlife Preservation in the Western Hemisphere of 1940,
and the South Pacific Convention on Nature and Natural Resources of 1976. Very few
marine protected areas have been established under these treaties.
The second kind of treaty more specifically addresses the establishment of
marine protected areas, for example, the regional seas conventions and especially the
new protocol to the Barcelona Convention, which is concerned with establishing
protected areas within the jurisdictions of Mediterranean coastal countries.
Awareness of the importance of marine protected areas is comparatively new,
and national authorities whose experience has been limited to terrestrial protected
areas are generally those charged with implementing the treaties. Even so, the new
treaty on the southern ocean contains, for the first time in a fishery treaty, specific
provisions on protected areas.
Whilst MPAs first evolved as a result of national initiatives, and thus depended
on the awareness of their usefulness by governments, they have since been slowly
incorporated in the growing body of international instruments negotiated to ensure
the conservation of marine and coastal resources. These range from non-binding
programmes of action (e.g., the Barbados Programme of Action on Small Island
Developing States, the Global Programme of Action on Land-Based Activities—the
GPA) to legally binding treaties (e.g., the Convention on Biological Diversity—the CBD—
or the SPAW Protocol to the Cartagena Convention). The former are reflective of “soft
law,” while the latter constitute “hard law,” but both sets of instruments reflect a clear
understanding by the negotiating States of the value of MPAs. Other treaties, which
at first did not focus on the protection of marine habitats, have slowly evolved into
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