Pride: The Secret Ingredient To No-Fishing Reserves That Work

In a conference room in Cebu City, packed with over 300 Filipino mayors for the National Coastal Fisheries Summit in Cebu City, 12 raise their right hands to take a pledge. The buzzing energy of the crowd instills a sense of togetherness, pride and excitement that reverberates through the room. Across the globe, Honduran mayors take the same pledge in front of local community members, cementing their commitment to protect their most valuable and vulnerable resource; the ocean.

The pride in the room is palpable. When it comes to protecting the ocean, human psychology is intimately interwoven with regulatory effectiveness. Emotional and psychological influences are incredibly powerful yet rarely considered in marine management, and specifically in the creation of marine reserves.

One environmental non-profit Rare uses behavioral psychology tenets to design networks of no-take reserves. Closed to fishing, reserves seek to maintain pristine ecosystems free of human interaction, fishing pressure and destruction. However without community support, reserves don’t stand a chance. “If people don’t buy in, we won’t have any effect,” says Dr. Courtney Cox, director of applied marine science at Rare, “Creating pride is an important behavioral component of the design. Pride leads to greater compliance with management and participation with enforcement”. Coastal areas are used by a many different groups, each with unique needs, desires and claims to the ocean’s resources. In order for reserves to work, people must accept that long-term benefits are worth the short-term loss of income and access.

By taking the pledge, mayors are committing to a set of behaviors and management strategies that are proven effective, such as encouraging community participation in management and enforcement. As part of their Fish Forever program Rare works within community and government structures in places like the Philippines and Honduras to train local leaders, and bolster community participation.

By minimizing fishing pressure, fish are able to reproduce and eventually “spill over” into the non-protected areas adjacent to the reserves. This starts with protecting fish even as tiny larva that travel with ocean currents. Dr. Cox explains that creating networks of reserves and managed areas is important to link local governments through the movement of larval and adult fishes: “larval dispersal modeling is a compelling bit of science that shows how fish move across a region and how fishing in one area can affect another”.

Rare believes in changing the attitudes of fishers through open dialogue so that reserves are championed, rather than viewed as burdensome restrictions. “We take that understanding of what makes people tick, and embed that into our design,” says Dr. Cox, “ we give them a sense of when things will get better and by how much, and prepare them for the fact that it won’t happen right away or all at once”.

Tragedy of the commons occurs when a shared resource is exploited as everyone with access to the resource looks out for their own best interests. Over time, the collective exploitation of the ‘commons’ causes its eventual demise. If each fisher catches as many fish as possible each day without restriction, the pool of available fish will be depleted, eventually causing the collapse of the fishery. In this scenario, everyone who relies on those fish will suffer.

However, in a reserve situation, the commons is protected, allowing fish that so many rely on for food and income to repopulate. Rare believes that through collective action and understanding, humans and nature can coexist in harmony.

In the coming months, the boundaries of one reserve in the Philippines’ Tañon Strait will be finalized. After learning about how the proposed reserve site supports important larval survival of fish, the local government and communities decided to triple their reserve size. When deciding on marine protections, there is usually pushback on enlarging reserves and taking away prime fishing grounds, “that is why having that dialogue is so important,” Dr. Cox explains. Participation works, and Rare is successfully achieving community buy-in around the world.