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While marine protected areas are a principal means used around the world to conserve marine environments, in recent years, the health of Thai marine national parks has decreased due to coral bleaching, illegal fishing and poor tourism management. Inappropriate application of management approaches, lack of management capacity and poor management schemes are possible reasons for this decline in the quality of the marine environment. With fundamentally different social expectations and differing biological and geophysical characteristics between terrestrial and marine protected areas, specialised marine expertise and experience is needed for effective management. In Thailand, marine national park staff largely come from a terrestrial park background and tend to apply strategies known to be effective in terrestrial situations, but which are often inappropriate in the maritime situation. In the absence of needed marine experience, researchers can provide insights to management through studying management effectiveness and informing managers how they might improve strategies for achieving nature conservation and other management objectives. This research sought to identify factors limiting the effectiveness of marine park management under Thai circumstances and to identify potential improvements. Surin Marine National Park was chosen as a case study area because of the importance of this site, the existence of considerable baseline information on reef condition and my previous experience with management of the area. Change in coral cover was used to evaluate the effectiveness of management in protecting reef condition. The acceptability of existing and other possible management approaches to stakeholders was examined through questionnaires, and observation. The planned study was interrupted when the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami hit Thailands Andaman coast. As well as the devastation caused to coastal communities, the tsunami prevented the original research programme from being completed. However, it created a unique opportunity to examine the biophysical and management impacts that an unforseen perturbation could have and gave greater insight to the factors influencing the effectiveness of the management system. The research indicates that installing facilities (e.g. mooring buoys, piers, and sewage treatment plants) can help reduce the negative impact of use on coral reefs; however, these approaches are dependent on government capital investment and do not fully address use issues. Regulatory approaches (patrolling and enforcement) can help reduce inappropriate behaviour of resource users, but they too are capital intensive and strongly rely on the parks management capacity (i.e. budget and personnel). Shortfalls in the management budget and/or personnel directly affect the effectiveness of these approaches, which have been the principal management techniques applied at Surin to date. Respondents were largely ignorant of or ambivalent towards zoning and prohibition approaches to management, possibly because of insufficient communication of this information. As a result, the ability of stakeholders to self-regulate their use of natural resources is limited. This is exacerbated by Surins management capacity being strongly dependent on income derived from tourism expenditure. In the absence of understanding of the management techniques applied, especially controls such as the zoning plan, management has not been able to defend its management, has bowed to external pressure, and opened prohibited areas to use when reef condition in other areas declined. This study suggests that a more co-operative approach to management, based on effective communication with stakeholders, and backed by strategic facilities and regulations, will result in improved management outcomes. Management reliant on top-up funding is always vulnerable to shifts in tourism trends, making forward planning of conservation works difficult. This situation was confirmed by the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. While the tsunami was assumed to have devastated the reefs around Surin, the study revealed that the physical and biological effects on the reef environments were less severe than expected. Although the effect of the tsunami on reef communities was limited, management was more severely affected. This led to the emergence of threats of possibly greater long-term moment than the tsunami. The interpretation programme and reef monitoring were suspended and delayed in being re-established due to the limited Government budget. The research identified donations and volunteer work as opportunities to address the budget shortfall, but these require a fundamentally different approach to management being in place: one that requires a shift towards co-management of Surin with stakeholders. With reduced management capacity and new threats emerging after the tsunami, the need for greater collaboration in the management of the park was identified. Tour operators support management and, from the tsunami situation, are willing to assist the park in many ways. Involving the tourism sectors in conserving practices, rather than just using the reefs, is important and can fill the gap in management capacity. |
