Creating a common ground for the implementation of a community-based Marine Protected Area – a case study in Algarve, Portugal

Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are a key tool for the worldwide strategy to halt the decline of biodiversity, yet they can also escalate conflicts between different human activities, conservation and other societal interests. Enabling conditions to secure MPAs effectiveness and the ability to deliver the desired socio-ecological outcomes often include the application of participatory approaches. One example of these approaches are collective visioning exercises where stakeholders can work together, projecting into the future their expectations and goals for MPAs. Our study presents a visioning exercise, using an adaptation of the Territory Game technique, as a starting point of a long and comprehensive participatory process to implement a community-based MPA in the southern part of Portugal. This particular MPA aims at protecting one of the largest rocky reefs of the Portuguese coast, an important biodiversity and human activities' hotspot, stressing the need to accommodate different interests into its design and planning. To the best of our knowledge, and in the context of an MPA, this is one of the few studies in the literature where the process of creating a stakeholders’ shared vision is described. Stakeholder mapping and raising interest activities were used to motivate their participation. A total of 7 visions were co-created by 50 stakeholders of 30 different institutions. From this set we were able to congregate a shared vision that became the flag of the subsequent participatory process. The visioning exercise made explicit that the MPA is a long-term investment, that includes immediate costs and benefits, some that will only arrive later. Considering the immediate costs, the desire to identify compensatory measures was also made explicit. Our results show that using visioning exercises in the early stages of an MPA design broadens the discussions and paves the way for less consensual tasks such as MPA zoning and regulation.