Abstract

Socio-cultural factors play prominent roles in coastal and marine resource use and management in the Caribbean region. Approaches to marine ecosystem- based management (EBM) that ignore social considerations may have a higher risk of failure. The internationally agreed-upon twelve principles of the ecosystem approach form a useful starting point for identifying relevant social considerations (for the list of twelve principles, see http://www.cbd.int/ecosystem/principles.shtml). Some of these principles involve stakeholders, institutions, communities, power, participation, culture, adaptive capacity, livelihoods, poverty, knowledge and conflict. Incorporating social considerations into marine EBM, from design to evaluation, should be seen as an asset and not a liability. Addressing social issues, linked closely to the governance of social-ecological systems, may contribute significantly to the success of marine EBM initiatives in the Caribbean. Social considerations should be of high priority in all marine EBM situations, and the competence exists in the region for these to be taken into account.

Why Consider Social Aspects?

Broadly speaking, marine EBM encompasses a whole suite of arrangements, approaches, processes, methods, tools, activities and the like that concern very comprehensive ocean (here taken as both marine and coastal) resource governance. Familiar examples may include the ecosystem approach to fisheries (EAF) or ecosystem-based fisheries management (EBFM), marine protected area (MPA) management, integrated coastal area management (ICAM), the ecosystem approach (EA) to biodiversity conservation, marine pollution control, sustainable tourism and more. Authors often make very fine distinctions among these terms based mainly on views of how and when ecosystem thinking gets integrated into management; see Christie et al. (2007) for an analysis. Since such fine distinctions are largely irrelevant to an examination of the social aspects, we will ignore them in this chapter and use marine EBM to include any of their components applied to marine ecosystems.

Marine EBM is part of principled ocean governance. Governance can be defined as the whole of public as well as private interactions taken to solve societal problems and create societal opportunities, including the formulation and application of principles guiding those interactions and care for institutions that enable them (Bavinck et al. 2005).