However, there have been few studies that integrate or connect principal components of in-stitutions and governance in the same comprehensive analytical framework or closely combine inst
Trang 1A multilevel analytical framework for more-effective governance in
human-natural systems: A case study of marine protected areas in
Vietnam
Thu Van Trung Hoa,b,*, Simon Woodleyb, Alison Cottrellb, Peter Valentineb
a Department of AquaSciences, School of Biotechnology, International University e Vietnam National University Hochiminh City, Quarter 6, Linh Trung
Ward, Thu Duc District, Hochiminh City, Viet Nam
b School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, James Cook University, 1 James Cook Drive, Townsville, QLD 4811, Australia
a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history:
Available online 23 January 2014
a b s t r a c t
Marine protected areas (MPAs) can be viewed as coupled human-natural systems where a significant number of local people depend on ecosystem goods and services There are times when these uses contribute to ecosystem degradation that may eventually lead to a systems’ collapse In addition to studies of technical means for predicting and controlling the systems, the understanding of human di-mensions, institutional and social-interaction issues has been considered important for improving effective governance of these systems This paper presents a multilevel analytical framework and dis-cusses application of this framework to the context of three MPAs in Vietnam It disdis-cusses the devel-opment of the framework based on a new perspective that views institutions as a structure and governance as a process for operating a governing system As a result, inter-relations and mutual in-fluences of institutions and governance occurred within the MPAs are illustrated as a causeeeffect relationship diagram These are grouped into three components (i) formal institutions; (ii) political behaviour and organizational structure; and (iii) local communities’ engagement, social capital and socio-economic conditions These components interact with each other and influence the interplays of actors, both state and non-state, for MPA governance Findings from this study suggest that institutions should be adaptive and regularly amended based on their performance in real-world governance pro-cesses This ensures the match between the approved institutions and their practical effects in complex contextual conditions Meanwhile, there should be accountable and transparent dialogues and mecha-nisms for all the stakeholders and actors to be actively involved in the development of institutions, and evaluating and monitoring governance processes Bridging actors or organizations also need to be available as active facilitators of these dialogues and mechanisms When the institutional and social-interaction issues are solved, governance of coupled human-natural systems, such as MPAs, will be enhanced
Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved
1 Introduction
Marine protected areas (MPAs) have been recognized as
important tools forfisheries management (Bohnsack, 1998) and in
situ conservation (Chape et al., 2005) Increases in the spawning
biomass and mean size of caught stocks (Roberts and Hawkins,
2000; Gell and Roberts, 2003), population abundance (Côte et al.,
2001), population density, biomass, fish size, and diversity (Roberts and Hawkins, 2000; Halpern, 2003; Palumbi, 2004) have been observed and recorded within their boundaries These may also increase the exploited biomass in the adjacent areas due to
‘spill-over’ effects (Kramer and Chapman, 1999; Tupper and Juanes, 1999; Roberts et al., 2001; Gell and Roberts, 2003) MPAs are also considered to help maintain the genetic diversity of wild pop-ulations by protecting breeding stocks and thereby improving the genetic heterozygosity (Bergh and Getz, 1989) These benefits are not only within a certain area, country, but also trans-boundary because MPAs can occur between nations or in a broader geographic region (IUCN-WCPA, 2008) However, effective
* Corresponding author Department of AquaSciences, School of Biotechnology,
International University e Vietnam National University HCM City, Quarter 6, Linh
Trung Ward, Thu Duc District, HCM City, Viet Nam Tel.: þ84 902 917 727; fax: þ84
8 37 244 271.
E-mail addresses: thu_hovantrung@yahoo.com , hvtthu@hcmiu.edu.vn (T Van
Trung Ho).
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Ocean & Coastal Management 90 (2014) 11e19
Trang 2management of MPAs has been raised as a major concern for their
establishment and implementation Some MPAs exist as “paper
parks” where resource uses and other activities that may negatively
affect the MPAs are not restricted or effectively managed, so that
the objectives of these sites are not achieved (Kelleher and
Kenchington, 1992; Roberts and Hawkins, 2000) While
institu-tional and governance problems are stated as substantive
chal-lenges for effective management (Hanna, 2006; Christie et al.,
2007), institutional and governance indicators have also been
used to demonstrate management effectiveness of MPAs (Pomeroy
et al., 2004)
While institutions consist of established norms and behaviours,
political structures, and legal arrangements (Ostrom, 1990a; Berkes,
2004), governance is“the interactions among structures, processes
and traditions that determine how power and responsibilities are
exercised, how decisions are taken, and how citizens or other
stakeholders have their say” (Graham et al., 2003) In other words, a
governing system can be viewed as consisting of two major
com-ponents e institutions and governance While institutions are ‘hard
structures’ containing legal tools, governance is a ‘process’ that
describes how the actors and players utilize legal tools to govern
embedded actors and their activities towards common purposes If
any of these components are weak, then that would influence the
overall outputs and outcomes of the governance process
There are a number of generic studies about institutions (North,
1990; Ostrom, 1990b; Knight, 1992b; Crawford and Ostrom, 1995)
and institutional analysis for natural resource management
(Oakerson, 1990; Ostrom, 1992; Imperial, 1999a, 1999b; Gibson
et al., 2000; Noble, 2000; Olsson and Folke, 2001; Hagedorn
et al., 2002; Dolsak and Ostrom, 2003a) as well as governance
processes (Swallow and Bromley, 1995; Costanza et al., 1998;
Borrini-Feyerabend, 2003; Graham et al., 2003; Christie and
White, 2007; Garmerstani and Benson, 2013) Some of these studies
have addressed principles, criteria, or indicators, and formed
frameworks that have been applied as guidelines for evaluating the
performance or outcomes of natural resource management
pro-grammes, in general (Oakerson, 1990; Thomson, 1992; Pido et al.,
1997; Hagedorn et al., 2002; Dolsak and Ostrom, 2003a), and in
the particularfield of marine resources (Pomeroy, 1995; Pido et al.,
1997; Juda and Hennessy, 2001; Tompkins et al., 2002; Rudd et al.,
2003; Hidayat, 2005; Hilborn et al., 2005; Hanna, 2006; Kim, 2012)
Mutual influences between institutions, governance and the
context on the outputs and outcomes of state development, in
general, have been studied and discussed by researchers (Fritz and
Menocal, 2007; Grindle, 2007) However, there have been few
studies that integrate or connect principal components of
in-stitutions and governance in the same comprehensive analytical
framework or closely combine institutional and governance
per-spectives into the same framework for studying the conservation
and uses of natural resources in coupled human-natural systems,
especially for MPAs
This paper aims to (i) introduce a multilevel analytical
frame-work developed for such research We propose the integration of
institutions and governance as obligatory components for
opera-tions of human-natural systems, while social interacopera-tions and
contextual factors can influence the outcomes of the operations It
also (ii) briefly discusses findings when applying this framework to
examine the governance of MPAs in Vietnam where the roles of
NGOs and other social organizations are blurred and overlooked for
these operations The remainder of the paper is structured as
fol-lows Section 2 describes the functions of the systems that can
operate through an inherent linkage between institutional
ar-rangements and governance The introduction of how to develop a
multilevel analytical framework and principles reviewed for the
application of this framework is the main content of Section3 The
Section4presents major results when applying the framework to practical investigation of three MPAs in Vietnam Thefinal section concludes with some implications of the framework to improve effective governance of MPAs in Vietnam and other areas with similar contextual conditions
2 Institutions and governance e the obligatory elements for operations of humanenatural systems
2.1 Institutions Institutions have been variously defined by researchers (Schmid, 1972; Schotter, 1981; Bromley, 1989; North, 1990; Ostrom, 1990a; Knight, 1992a) These are the sets of working rules (Ostrom, 1990a) or any form of constraints devised by human beings to shape human interactions (North, 1990) Institutions consist of established norms and behaviour, political structures and legal ar-rangements (Ostrom, 1992; Scott, 1992) Established norms and behaviour are called informal rules or constraints, and are un-written (North, 1990), for example, customary regulations, social norms, customs, habits or taboos Legal arrangements, however, include documented rules, namely formal rules or constraints (North, 1990), for example, political rules, contracts, agreements Both formal and informal constraints operate through three levels: operational, collective-choice and constitutional (Kiser and Ostrom,
1982, cited byFirmin-Seller, 1995) Institutions include determining persons to be responsible, actions to be allowed, information to be disseminated and incentive sharing mechanisms These can be viewed as standards of behaviour (Schotter, 1981)
Institutions and organisations have some shared attributes Organisations can be viewed as institutions if they are defined by rules, norms and shared strategies (Ostrom et al., 1993; Imperial, 1999b) The existence and evolution of organisations are funda-mentally affected by institutional frameworks (North, 1990) The transformation of organisations may also require institutional changes to support achievement of strategic objectives Both stitutions and organisations provide a structure to human in-teractions (North, 1990) They may ‘co-evolve’ in certain circumstances with bi-directional ‘feed-backs’ leading to the
refining of shared objectives Indeed, organizational change should
be taken into account when studying institutions, as should governance
2.2 Governance Governance is an awkward concept It has different meanings to different people (Stoker, 1998; Kooiman and Bavinck, 2005) Governance can be viewed as a social coordination mechanism (Lee, 2003) or the generation of conditions for ordered rules and collective actions (Stoker, 1998) It can be considered as a process for people or institutions to make decisions and share power (Pierre and Peters, 2000) in order to achieve desired objectives (Graham et al., 2003) This process has been defined relating to roles, responsibility, power, relationships and accountability (Borrini-Feyerabend, 2003; Graham et al., 2003) According toJones
et al (2011), governance is related to incentives of not only civil society and state, but also the market, in order to achieve strategic objectives For this paper, governance is perceived as interactions among state and non-state actors to exercise power and re-sponsibility, make decisions for solving societal problems, and create societal opportunities (Graham et al., 2003; Kooiman and Bavinck, 2005)
Governance can share some components with institutions It consists of actors and the structures in which these actors are embedded While the actors can be individuals, groups of
T Van Trung Ho et al / Ocean & Coastal Management 90 (2014) 11e19
Trang 3individuals, associations,firms, international bodies etc the
struc-ture implies a set of culstruc-ture, customary regulations, laws and
technical possibilities (Kooiman, 2008) It is evident that formal and
informal rules supplement each other in specific cases Informal
rules and social networks play important roles in solving social
dilemmas including conflicts over resource uses in a society,
especially where the formal institutions are relatively weak (Cooke
et al., 2000; Rudd et al., 2003) It appears that individuals or
or-ganisations may govern each other based on the interactions
be-tween formal and informal institutions to make generic decisions
towards desired objectives
In brief, institutions provide formal rules, informal rules and
political structure as a“hard structure” to reduce uncertainties,
whereas governance is a‘process’ in which individuals or
organi-sations deploy powers and make decisions based on institutional
arrangements in order to achieve common-shared objectives
Human-natural systems as MPAs can only effectively function or
operate if these components are properly integrated
3 Integration of institutions and governance: a multilevel
analytical framework for studying MPAs as coupled human
and natural systems
A marine protected area with its dependent human
commu-nities can be considered as a type of coupled human-natural
sys-tems In MPAs, marine or coastal ecosystems may be considered as
a‘natural subset’, while the human subset consists of governance
structures, cultures, histories etc that are focused on goods and
services of the natural subset (Holling, 2001) Interventions of the
human subset may negatively affect the natural subset
Under-standing the capacity, robustness and internal interactions of the
systems to confront external uncertainties and disasters is
essen-tial Institutional analysis has been viewed to be comprehensive
only if conducted through a multilevel process (Ostrom, 1986;
Cosens, 2010) and complex and multi-dimensional perspectives
(Wilson, 2006; Wilson et al., 2007; Huitema et al 2009) There are
emerging perspectives to consider the capacity of the systems to
persist in a new situation, to confront the uncertainties and crises and then overcome constraints Therefore, the functions of overall systems, institutional arrangements and governance structure, and endogenous/exogenous factors, including social interactions and the context, must be taken into account for studies of the systems
To meet these suggestions, a framework requires inter-linked components is formed as Fig 1for studying human-natural sys-tems as MPAs
Brief descriptions of sub-components of the framework are described with illustrative examples relating to marine protected areas as follows:
3.1 The formal setting (i) State actors and organisations: can be individuals, associa-tions or agencies responsible for administrative management
of the political structure The administrative system is multilevel from local authorities to commune (hamlet), city (district), provincial (capital city) to central government agencies or even higher, if possible, at regional or interna-tional levels for trans-boundary or internainterna-tional systems The actors or agencies in the political structure normally exercise their power as proscribed in formal legal documents (ii) Formal institutions: are a set of rules, laws, regulations or contracts composed and approved by state actors or agencies
of the political structure (and may have some contributions from non-state actors and organisations) For example, in a marine protected area, formal institutions can be a man-agement plan, operational regulations etc These are devel-oped by an MPA authority and other related stakeholders, if possible, and approved by responsible state individual(s) or agency(ies)
(iii) Formal governance processes enforced by state actors or orga-nisations: governance processes can be conducted by state or non-state actors or a combination of these actors The pro-cess that is undertaken by formal actors using formal rules for enforcement within their responsible scope called formal
Fig 1 A multilevel analytical framework.
T Van Trung Ho et al / Ocean & Coastal Management 90 (2014) 11e19
Trang 4governance Another is an informal governance process
described in more detail (in section iii) below These
pro-cesses may occur simultaneously to constrain people
through given procedures of governmental structures or civil
society They may positively or negatively interact with each
other Objectives or approaches to these processes may or
may not align
3.2 The informal setting
(i) Non-state actors and organisations: include individuals and
mass organisations of civilians or resource users Leaders or
chairmen of these organisations are normally elected by
their members based upon accepted criteria, such as,
pres-tige, origin, religion or gender of the candidates These
in-dividuals can be a“village father” (de facto village leader),
religious leader or head of traditional trade in the
commu-nity These people or organisations represent the local
communities to bring their ideas or recommendations to
work with higher or responsible agencies In some local
communities, where traditional culture remains viable and
strongly influences local decision-making processes, these
individuals and organisations are responsible for enforcing
traditional rules in order to structure social interactions
In addition to civilians and resource users described as non-state
actors as above, other stakeholders should be mentioned in this
framework They can be NGOs, media, or private bodies who may
get involved in the institutional development and governance
processes They can help withfinancial support, technical
knowl-edge, information dissemination, workload support and
contrib-uting to think-tanks They may sometimes strongly influence the
rectification, declaration and dialogue of institutions However, in
the current political context in Vietnam, these players cannot get
involved in the development and approval of formal institutions or
play roles as decision or policy makers They are therefore classified
into non-state actors for this study
(ii) Informal institutional component: consists of informal rules,
customary regulations, belief or norms Informal rules are
normally created and developed through regular traditional
practices of culture or history of a civil society These are
handed down from one generation to another Informal rules
may be changed or developed in response to changes or
development of the society (culture, history, politics, and
economics) and through perceptions of local people about
these informal rules
(iii) Informal governance process: is undertaken by non-state
ac-tors or mass organisation(s) to deploy informal rules in order
to structure social interactions For example, in some
fish-eries villages in Vietnam, a de facto village leader has
re-sponsibilities to organize traditional festivals of the village
and has power to enforce local social activities
In this framework, social, economic, political, and cultural
fac-tors should be viewed as both consequences and forces of the
process of institutional change and governance performance On
the one hand, creation and maintenance of prosperous social,
economic and environmental systems are goals of sustainable
development (Folke et al., 2002) that individuals and organisations
embedded in the systems want to move towards and achieve In
this case, these are consequences On the other hand, these are
forces that can influence governance processes towards more or
less positive consequences In other words, these can be either
driving or restraining forces for governance process
3.3 Principles for collecting data While a framework portrays linkages and processes for ana-lysing the functions of systems, principles or criteria are practical points or foundations that practitioners can rely upon to put the framework into operations Various sets of principles for institu-tional and governance analysis have been suggested (Oakerson, 1990; Thomson, 1992; Pido et al., 1997; Costanza et al., 1998; Imperial, 1999a, 1999b; Hagedorn et al., 2002; Dolsak and Ostrom, 2003b; Graham et al., 2003), but it is difficult to accept any particular set of principles as a universal standard for analysis and evaluation Some are controversial (Graham et al., 2003) The
Table 1below reviews published research about principles related
to different components of the systems in a natural resource management arena (Pido et al., 1997; Bellamy et al., 1999; Imperial, 1999a, 1999b; Pretty and Ward, 2001; Rudd et al., 2003) that are applicable for the framework developed above
4 An application of the framework to marine protected areas
in Vietnam as case study 4.1 Context and problems of MPA management and governance in Vietnam
Vietnam has a high diversity in species composition and eco-systems for marine and coastal areas thanks to its long coastline of
3 260 km stretching over 13 degrees of latitude In addition to typical tropical ecosystems, such as coral reefs, seagrass beds, and mangroves, other coastal ecosystems with high bio-productivity, for example tidal marshes, lagoons, river mouths, tidal mudflats, wetlands or up-welling areas, have been recorded at these areas (Hoi et al., 2000) These ecosystems contain approximately 350 hard-coral and 120 soft-coral species; 15 seagrass species; 35 mangrove species; 334 species of gastropods and 356 species of bivalves; 2108 fish species; 5 sea-turtle species and 15 marine mammal species including whale, dolphin and dugong (Vinh and Yet, 1998)
Marine and coastal areas have become important for the eco-nomic development of Vietnam because of the high value of these
Table 1 Reviewed principles for application of the multilevel analytical framework Components Reviewed principles
1 Organizational structure ( Bellamy et al., 1999 )
Clear and consistent goals and objectives
Adequate financing
Good coordination
Adequate guidance to implementing agencies
Provisions for access by outsiders
2 Informal institutions ( Pretty and Ward, 2001;
Rudd et al., 2003; Pretty and Smith, 2004 )
Trusting relations
Reciprocity and exchanges
Common rules, norms and sanctions
Connectedness of networks and groups
Local ownership and benefit sharing mechanisms
3 Institutional performance:
(developed by Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues as a set
of attributes for an Institutional Analysis and Development Framework ( Imperial, 1999b, Imperial, 1999a )
Efficiency (market and administrative)
Equity
Accountability
Adaptability
4 Governance ( Graham et al., 2003;
Folke et al., 2005 ):
Performance
Fairness
Accountability
Legitimacy and Voice
Direction
T Van Trung Ho et al / Ocean & Coastal Management 90 (2014) 11e19
Trang 5diverse marine resources and a large Exclusive Economic Zone
(EEZ) of more than 1 million km2e threefold the mainland area of
the nation Marine dependent industries have contributed signi
fi-cantly to the GDP of the country, for example, oil exploration,
fisheries, marine-environment-based tourism, and maritime
transport However, severe challenges and difficulties for
man-agement and governance of marine resources and sustainable
development for the country have been encountered In addition to
a rapid increase in population, a number of destructive fishing
methods, including small-mesh-size net gear, dynamite and
cya-nidefishing practices, have been reported in most coastal areas
(Long, 2004) Fishing pressure has increased considerably since the
1980s Over-exploitation at near-shore waters (shallower than 50 m
depth) has occurred in this country since 1991.1The degradation of
marine resources has been reflected by fishers in provinces, such as,
Halong, Quang Binh, Thua Thien e Hue, Vung Tau, and My Tho,
where an annual catch of the samefishing-boat type has declined
2e3 times over the last 20 years (Thong, 2005) The establishment
of MPAs has been suggested as innovative solutions and
appro-priate management tools for protecting marine environments and
attaining biodiversity conservation in this country A list of 15
marine protected areas was introduced (Hoi et al., 1998; Ministry Of
Fisheries, 2006) and approved to form a national marine protected
area network in Vietnam in 20102for these objectives
Some MPAs in this network have been established under
different jurisdictions Of these, several sites were formed by
extending the marine component of existing National Parks, such
as Cat Ba and Con Dao These are under jurisdiction of the Ministry
of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) Thefirst two MPAs
e Nha Trang Bay and Culaocham, were established in the early
2000’s and shared the same institutional model under
adminis-trative jurisdiction of the Provincial People’s Committee and
tech-nical supervision of the Ministry of Fisheries (at the establishment
time) Both these werefinancially supported by international
or-ganisations3 with a strong commitment by the Government of
Vietnam through Ministry of Fisheries Subsequently, Phu Quoc
MPA was established as a demonstration site funded by the United
Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) and then supplemented by
technical and financial support of DANIDA through a project
“Supporting Marine Protected Area Network of Vietnam” This MPA
is under the jurisdiction of a provincial-sectoral department e
Department of Agriculture and Rural Development In addition,
some other small MPAs, such as Ran Trao, were formed based on
initiatives of the local authorities and communities with technical
andfinancial support of local NGOs, such as Marine Conservation
and Community Development (MCD) These MPAs have been
designed under different national, provincial and local
jurisdic-tions, with different objectives, rules and management approaches
Complications in the institutional structures have created some
dysfunctional management and governance processes within
in-dividual MPAs and coordination and linkage between the MPAs in
Vietnam Problems or challenges related to institutions and
governance for successfully establishing the national protected area
network have been partly reported in scholarly documents ICEM
(2003) stated that“(T)here are few wetlands and marine protected
areas in Vietnam The government has set a target of formally
establishing 15 MPAs by 2010, but the lack of a legal and
institutional framework is a major challenge” Furthermore, the Protected Area Resource Conservation project (PARC) has reviewed existing policies and institutions related to natural conservation and protected areas in general and elaborated that“Institutional arrangements for protected areas are complex, overlapping and inconsistent Inter-sectoral coordination is weak; There is no adequate process for management planning according to conservation priorities.” (PARC-project, 2006) These reviews have concen-trated on terrestrial ones rather than marine protected areas Research or reviews on marine-conservation-related institutions, governance and their issues are still limited
4.2 Research methods and approach for data collection
A deductive approach was used to carry out this investigation through collective case study to understand social interactions and institutional barriers to governance of MPAs in Vietnam Three marine conservation sites including Condao, Nha Trang Bay and Halong Bay (Fig 2) were selected as case studies for this research Data collected for this study are from secondary and primary sources Secondary data were collected and reviewed from legal documents and reports issued by agencies across national to local levels and MPA authorities Qualitative research techniques, including focus-group discussions, semi-structured and open-ended interviews, were applied for collecting primary data A to-tal of 83 participants were involved in this study, coming from government agencies, local authorities and MPA authorities The researchers started interviews using institutional problems drawn from secondary data and grouped into different themes based on reviewed principles (Table 1) Causes or reasons for the governance outcomes and consequences were probed and then addressed by interviewees based on their knowledge and experience Finally, perceived barriers and influential factors were analyzed, identified and summarized through a series of interviews and discussions between the researchers and participants
1 Source: Technical report of National Directorate of Capture Fisheries and
Fish-eries Resource Protection (DECAFIREP), 2009.
2 Decision No 742/QD-TTg on May 26, 2010, approving the Plan for establishment
of a national Marine Protected Area network.
3 World Bank/Global Environmental Funds, Danish International Development
T Van Trung Ho et al / Ocean & Coastal Management 90 (2014) 11e19
Trang 6In addition, a triangulation process was undertaken through
various data sources, personal observations, communications and
plenary discussions at meetings, workshops and conferences to
reduce personal and methodological biases and also enhance the
study’s generalizations (Decrop, 1999) Alphabet symbols were
used as participants’ identifiers for quoting in this paper These
were coded over the levels from national to local community levels
In particular,“N” was for participants from national level Similarly,
“P”, “C” and “L” were for provincial, communal and local
commu-nity levels, respectively GD was for focus group discussions
4.3 Major results and discussion
The research identified three groups of factors restraining
governance of the MPAs in Vietnam These are related to (i) formal
institutional complexity and overlapping, (ii) political behaviours
and organizational structure and (iii) diminished social capital and
difficult socio-economic conditions An overarching interactive
governance diagram (Fig 3) was formed based on the results of this
research and theoretical concepts related to organisations and
natural resource governance This diagram illustrates the causee
effect relationships between influential factors related to
in-stitutions, social interactions and governance of MPAs studied
There are inter-linked causes between these influential
vari-ables on governance of the MPAs When one variable affects a
component in the diagram, it also influences other groups that, in
turn, affect the overall outputs and outcomes of MPAs’ governance
Based on the specific context of Vietnam where state and non-state
actors are the major institutional players in governance processes,
including for MPAs, some researchfindings are elaborated relied
upon these groups to briefly demonstrate how the identified
restraining factors affect each actor group and create
inter-influences amongst the groups
i How problems occurred because of improperly formed
in-stitutions affect the governance among state-actor groups and
subsequently non-state actors:
Formal institutions not properly formed can influence the
collaboration between government agencies responsible for MPA
governance For example, environmental and natural resource enforcement responsibilities are generally allocated to MPA au-thorities and other provincial agencies including Department of Natural Resources and Environment and sub-Department of Cap-ture Fisheries and Fisheries Resources Protection (sub-DECAFIREP) However, there is no collaborative mechanism amongst the agencies to operate these responsibilities This creates problems in MPA governance that some responsibilities may be either concur-rently undertaken by more than one agency or overlooked because each agency assumes another is responsible [P34]
Similarly, when the legal mandates for marine resource con-servation and governance are inconsistently assigned to respon-sible agencies at the national level, then these are disordered with sectoral agencies at lower levels [P28, P25] The fact is that the mandates related to marine conservation have been transferred from Ministry of Fisheries to Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, and then partly shared with Vietnam Administration
on Sea and Islands (Ministry of Natural Resources and Environ-ment) These engender confusions for the in-charge policy makers, MPA managers, practitioners and local communities at MPA sites to make decisions related to organizational structure to effectively govern the MPAs The MPA authorities’ staff are concerned of their legal mandates and authorities in the administrative structure, and the design of the organisation [P23, P25, P35]
In addition, when the organizational structure of MPA author-ities is not clearly described in formal institutions, whether an administrative management agency or a business enterprise, then some problems related to mutual trust between state and non-state actors are encountered That, in turn, reduces the participation of non-state actors and other agencies in the governance of MPAs Basically, the MPA authorities play dual roles for conservation and community development when designed as a business agency As prescribed in legal documents the agency has rights to collect entrance fees and operate economic services within the MPAs For example, Nha Trang Bay MPA Authority has been recently reformed
as an agency under Nha Trang City People’s Committee and holds the entrance-fee collection responsibility This makes local com-munities view the authority as the major beneficiary of MPA con-servation outcomes from entrance fees and economic activities, while the communities have not received tangible benefits or reinvestment from this process [L14, L21]
Furthermore, benefit conflicts between the MPA authorities and tourism operators (private sector) for tourism services operated within the MPAs have been emerged Despite being an agency majorly responsible for MPA management, this authority does not have the legal mandate to enforce andfine illegal activities con-ducted within the site They have to depend on the support of other administrative agencies, such as Fisheries Department, to complete these tasks Whereas they are involved much in other economic activities operated in the MPA In other words, the MPA authority does not concentrate on the management and governance of MPAs, but spends more time for economic benefits from the MPA, instead
As a result, the MPA authority has been isolated from the viewpoint
of state agencies, private sector and local communities This has weakened the mutual trust and collaboration between the MPA authority, local communities and other state agencies in the governance of the MPA
The influences of improper formal institutions, including re-sponsibility allocation, and organizational hierarchy and structure,
on natural resources governance have also been recently reported
in research While institutional hierarchies (Gelcich et al 2010) or complex and inflexible institutional frameworks (Karkkainen, 2006; Craig, 2010) can reduce the outcomes of ecosystem man-agement, the hierarchy of organizational structure constrains the collaboration of institutional players at different levels (Prager,
T Van Trung Ho et al / Ocean & Coastal Management 90 (2014) 11e19
Trang 72010) Recent changes of institutions and organizational structures
for more efficient ocean governance have been reported in some
countries, such as, Japan, United States, United Kingdom, Norway
etc (Kim, 2012) These changes if occurred across scales and levels
of the organizational structures and institutions are essential for a
transformation of natural resources governance (Gelcich et al
2010) In other words, a flexible institutional arrangement and
organizational structure ably amended according to complex
contextual conditions can enhance natural resources governance
ii How problems occurred with non-state actors affect the
governance undertaken themselves and the state actors:
In addition to mutual trust, communication and reciprocity
were identified as major forces affecting the interactions and
re-lationships between state and non-state actors in the governance of
the MPAs studied Mutual trust has been eroded because of
suspi-cions emerged in the collaborative governance process of the MPA
While local communities have suspicions about MPA staff because
of their opaque enforcement of rules, the staff claimed that they
cannot trust the local communities because of their limited
ca-pacity and negative behaviour [L4, P7] Ultimately, local
commu-nities and MPA staff are dissatisfied and dislike each other The local
fishers have not collaborated with the MPA staff in the enforcement
process [L4, L14] They, for example, do not inform the MPA staff
when recognized illegal fishing boats operating within the
pro-hibited areas [L13, L14, L16, and L4]
However, regular communication and reciprocity were argued
to help enhance mutual trust and encourage local communities
involved in MPA governance [C4, C5, and L15] An
information-sharing mechanism or informal dialogue can be a substantial
means for state and non-state actors to share information and
better understand each other Especially when local communities
can get involved in the deliberations and contribute to the decision
making processes [C7, L15] In this case, an organization that can be
a bridge for connecting the actors and facilitating their involvement
in the deliberations and dialogue is a need
iii A need of a bridging organization for these MPA governance
processes:
A bridging organization initiative has been studied and
confirmed to have a number of advantages for governance of
human-natural systems Can this initiative be considered to help
improve the governance of the study MPAs? In this study,
gov-ernment participants suggested that the MPA authority should be
combined into an existing government agency of the political
sys-tem [P28, P30] Meanwhile, the local people, relying upon their
perspectives and perceptions, complained about the inadequacy of
the authority and the outputs and outcomes of MPA governance
when it is designed as a government agency They thought that
local communities could govern the MPA even better than the
existing MPA authority [L1, L4] It seems state-level solutions may
not address local problems and might cause new problems for the
local level (Cash et al., 2006) According to McCay (2002), an
in-dividual’s rationality and attitudes can be formed by the social
context within which they are embedded Actors at different levels,
thus, have different perspectives and perceptions on the same
problem or phenomenon (Cash et al., 2006)
In addition, MPA authorities in Vietnam, such as, Nha Trang Bay
MPA and Culaocham MPA authorities have received technical and
financial support from international and non-government
organi-sations through projects formed as parallel bodies or groups (e.g
Hon Mun MPA project, Culaocham MPA project) Specifically, these
groups, established as a bridging organisation, together with the
MPA authorities, have used a participatory approach to convene activities to help develop management plans and other legal doc-uments to manage the MPAs Local communities and other stake-holders were invited to participate in these activities However, these groups have depended upon external temporary funds (in-ternational and non-government organisations), so they are not sustainable.4While these groups can be perceived as bridging or-ganisations, the MPA authorities are not because they are defined as agencies, on behalf of the government, to play roles of enforcers and implementers, rather than facilitators and mediators, for the governance of the MPAs
As it is evident from the overarching interactive governance framework developed from this research (Fig 3) that there are different barriers and uncertainties that may influence the in-teractions between state and non-state actors in making decisions for the interactive governance of the MPAs Thus, an independent body with a neutral approach that gathers and harmonizes per-spectives and perceptions of both government and civil actors to manage resources should be a potential alternative It consists of representatives of both state and non-state actors may help confront the identified barriers Its members should also be pro-fessionals from different sectors (Guston, 2001), including scien-tists, policy makers, policy enforcers, private sector and local communities In other words, a governing authority of MPAs in Vietnam, where there are diverse and conflicting stakeholders and actors, should be facilitated by a third party e a “bridging organi-sation” (Folke et al., 2005; Hahn et al., 2006; Berkes, 2009) or
“boundary organisation” (Cash, 2001; Guston, 2001; White et al.,
2008)
5 Implications for MPA governance This paper introduces a novel perspective to combining in-stitutions and governance analyses and research in those social interactions, human beings and their capacity are placed as focal points; and social, economic, cultural and political conditions are
influential factors for institutional change From a theoretical perspective, the framework can assist MPAs’ managers, practi-tioners, policy makers and scientists to have a more comprehensive and integrated lens through which to analyze mutual influences of institutions and social interactions on effective governance From the operational framework developed, there are three major influences on the effectiveness of governance and sustain-ability of the human and natural systems These are related to formal institutions, political behaviour and organizational struc-ture, and social capital and socio-economic conditions of local communities When MPAs are considered as coupled human and natural systems in an ever-changing world, they face severe pre-dicted impacts, such as climate change Governance of these sys-tems should utilize multi-dimensional, flexible and adaptive approaches to cope with uncertainties generated by such in-fluences The institutions should be adaptive and regularly amen-ded based on their performance in real world governance processes This ensures the match between the approved in-stitutions and their practical effects in complex contextual conditions
It is suggested there should be accountable and transparent information-sharing dialogues and reciprocity mechanisms for all stakeholders and actors to communicate and be actively involved in deliberations for the development of institutions, evaluating and monitoring, and adjusting the governance process A bridging or-ganization consisting of state and non-state-actors also needs to be
4
T Van Trung Ho et al / Ocean & Coastal Management 90 (2014) 11e19
Trang 8available as an active facilitating body for these dialogues and
mechanisms and enhance mutual trust between the actors The
organisation should undertake intermediary roles However, the
capacity of the organisation and its members can be a challenge for
completing its functions, especially where members from local
communities are included (White et al., 2008) Leadership is
another requirement for the organisation to facilitate all
stake-holders to develop visions and implement activities through
complex cross-scale or cross-level processes (Cash et al., 2006)
When the institutional and social interactive issues are solved,
effective governance of human-natural systems, such as MPAs, will
be increased
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