Native People and Planning for Marine Protected Areas: How “Stakeholder” Processes Fail to Address Conflicts in Complex, Real-World Environments

Abstract

Serious declines in fisheries around the world and marked deterioration in the overall health of marine ecosystems have been attracting great concern among scientists, environmentalists, and fishermen for more than a decade. Many marine ecologists and fisheries biologists have embraced marine protected areas (MPAs) as an appropriate policy prescription. Consistent with nearly all current environmental planning initiatives, collaborative “stakeholder” processes are the preferred method of designating and implementing MPAs. There are several problems with the way this model is conceptualized and operationalized, particularly as it pertains to aboriginal people: (1) proponents of MPAs and other marine conservation initiatives often focus on aggregate costs/benefits, without regard to distributive inequalities; (2) the prevailing assumption that all relevant “stakeholders” can be jointly incorporated into a collaborative process is misleading, given that there are significant differences in legal rights and other political capacities among the various “stakeholders”; (3) political institutions have a significant role in creating the different status of stakeholder groups, and thus shaping their interests, goals, capacities, and strategies. Two cases—MPA planning efforts in Washington State and in British Columbia—will be used to illustrate the argument, and in each case, I focus on how aboriginal groups are incorporated into both the immediate planning processes and the larger polity, and how a careful consideration of these factors and the effects they have on the groups’ capacities to affect outcomes deepens our understanding of MPA design, implementation, and management.

Keywords:

• collaborative environmental policy
• environmental policy
• First Nations
• marine policy
• marine protected areas
• native people
• tribes

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the Border Policy Institute at Western Washington University for a grant that enabled the author to research and write this article. Thanks also to three anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions. Errors that remain are, of course, the author's responsibility.

Notes

1. P. J. Jones (2006) suggests that while biologists tend to be strong proponents of MPAs, the perspectives of fishers and fisheries biologists are less positive.

2. The literature on common pool resources is replete with examples of attempts to institute community management of various natural resources that failed because of gender, class, or ethnic cleavages. See Agrawal and Gibson (2001) for a sampling.

3. See Hanna (1998) for a cogent application of the concept of institutions to fisheries management.

4. During most of the 25-year period after the ruling U.S. v. Washington, Phase II, the tribes have attempted to use the habitat protections contained in the decision indirectly, as a sort of 800-pound gorilla-in-the-closet. But after many years of waiting for the right case, in 2000 the treaty tribes brought suit against the state over the effects of antiquated road culverts on salmon spawning habitat. In 2007, a federal district court in Seattle ruled in favor of the tribes. State and tribal officials are currently negotiating on how, and how quickly, the state will address the issue.

5. This fact was recognized and addressed by Judge Boldt, author of the U.S. v. Washington decision, when he issued a set of exacting requirements state managers had to satisfy before imposing restrictions on tribal fishing.

6. For historical background, see Lichatowich (1999); for reports on current conditions, see British Columbia's Coastal Environment: 2006 (http://www.env.gov.bc.ca/soe/bcce/index.html), EPA indicators Report for Puget Sound/Georgia Basin (http://www.epa.gov/region10/psgb/indicators/), State of the Sound 2007 (http://www.psp.wa.gov/publications/puget_sound/sos/2007_stateofthesound_fulldoc.pdf).

7. In 2006, representatives of Washington tribes and the First Nations of British Columbia held the first of an ongoing series of meetings entitled “Salish Sea Gatherings” designed to tighten linkages between native peoples in the region, and to give them a platform from which to address state, federal, and provincial agency leaders on environmental issues of particular concern to native populations.

8. Recent cases have held that corporations are under similar obligations (Haida Nation v. British Columbia (Minister of Forests)2002 (Haida #1); Haida Nation v. British Columia (Minister of Forests) (2002) (Haida #2); Taku River Tlingit First Nation v. Tulsequah Chief Mine Protect (2002).

9. According to guidelines laid out by the court in Regina v. Sparrow (1990), government fisheries managers must observe the following prioritization schedule in managing fisheries and allocating opportunities to fish: (1) conservation; (2) aboriginal food, social, and ceremonial fishing, and (3) commercial and sport fishing.

10. The first reference (which misspells the name of the group in question) pertains to the renaming of a highway in Southern California. The second reference, which notes that “tribal organizations need to be included” comes last in a long series of recommended structural changes emerging from the “Cultural Heritage” subgroup (NMPAC, 2005, 28).

11. See Singleton (1998; 1999) for a closer examination of the institutions once used successfully by PNW tribes to overcome collective action problems stemming from distributive inequalities. Basically, native people were able to use highly efficient, but somewhat unequal, systems of property rights over resources because these rights were embedded in a network of broader redistributive institutions. In many of these societies, wealth really did “trickle down.”