A guide for planners and managers - IUCN

248 MARINE AND COASTAL
PROTECTED AREAS
Bunaken, the National Park office has been facilitating a participatory management
approach, developing strategic partnerships with government agencies, the private
sector and local communities in order to access necessary technical and financial
support.
Bunaken NP is an example of an MPA with established intensive use, and
multiple stakeholders with potentially competing interests, in a country with high levels
of corruption, limited state budgets, and where law enforcement is known to be
patchy. In such an environment, effective conservation management requires the
adoption of a multi-stakeholder participatory management process, with adequate
balances between rights and responsibilities of stakeholders. Such a process creates
a strong lobby against outside unilateral interests, and increases compliance to park
regulations thus reducing the shared costs that are shared management costs. It is
also necessary to balance sustainable economic development opportunities with
broader conservation objectives. Finally, management must be adaptive as resource
use pressures change over time, as demonstrated by recent changes in Bunaken NP.
The path to participatory management has been long. The main section of the
park was declared a provincial park in 1980, followed by the southern coastal section
in 1984. In 1991, both areas were combined and designated as the Bunaken NP. Detailed
mapping and surveys of the park began in 1991 along with identification and engagement
of user groups and other stakeholders. Four major stakeholder groups with
competing interests in the park were identified, and early planning for the park was
a process of sparring between three of these, the provincial government, the tourism
industry represented by local dive operators, and the central government represented
by the Ministry of Forestry (Box 1). The local communities, an important stakeholder,
were left out. The provincial government’s primary interest was tourism development
and resultant revenue generation, supported by a long-held misconception that the
tourism value of the park greatly outweighed uses such as fisheries. Further, there
was a belief that the park was suitable for mass beach tourism similar to that of Bali,
even though the beaches in the park are limited in size and unsuitable for this. The
local dive operators were based outside the park on the mainland and had long
lobbied for a ban on tourism facilities inside the park. Their primary motive was that
whoever obtained permission to develop facilities in the park would obtain an unfair
competitive advantage. The Directorate-General of Forest Protection and Nature
Conservation (PHPA) of the Ministry of Forestry as the agency responsible for
designation and management of conservation areas in Indonesia perceived the major
goal of the park as conservation. Three stakeholders perceived the activities (mainly
farming and fishing) of the fourth major stakeholder group, namely local communities,
as incompatible with their perceived goals of the park. Therefore communities living
in and around the park were largely unwanted pawns until the planning process begun
in 1991 by a USAID project (the Natural Resources Management Project or NRMP)
actively encouraged their participation.