A governança em áreas marinhas protegidas e a importância da gestão socioeconômica no âmbito conservacionista

Abstract

Threats to the sustainability in natural resource use are mainly caused by conflicts between resource management and resource users, which need a proper conflict management. Thus, is necessary to understand the conflict, the degree of threat caused by the conflict and in the sustainability, but mostly, the reasoning behind the conflict in resource use. In this way, we can find the better management strategies. The aim of this thesis is to understand how the socio-economic context affects the environmental health and the attitudes regarding governance in sustainable use Marine Protected Areas (MPAs). In the first chapter, we analysed data reporting environmental threats in a national scale associated to municipal socio-economic indicators (Gross domestic product, Gini index, human development index, extreme poverty index, Illiteracy). A high association among extreme poverty and environmental threats was found, especially natural resource use and urbanization threats. For the second and the chapter, we analysed data in local scale regarding governance attitudes among local users from different stakeholder groups in a MPA along with their socio-economic characteristics. In the second we used this data to analyse the differences in evaluation capacity among the different stakeholder groups, and as a result we found that the higher the level of social organization of a stakeholder group, the higher is their consensus within group and their evaluation capacity. In the third chapter we used this information to model the individual governance attitudes predicting that socio-economic context would influence their attitudes. We found that education, income, socio-political engagement, and environmental interest are strongly associated to positive governance attitudes. For both regional and local scale, we found that there is a strong association between low socio-economic indicators and high prevalence of environmental threats and bad governance attitudes among stakeholders. We also found that these negative attitudes are worse among vulnerable groups. It highlights the need for a strong socio-environmental agenda in the MPA management focusing in community education and empowerment of vulnerable groups, for the promotion of an inclusive and fair management which seeks for appropriate conflict management.