Practitioner approaches to trade‐off decision‐making in marine conservation development

Mounting evidence suggests that win‐wins are elusive and trade‐offs are the norm in marine conservation development practice. The status quo involves trade‐offs, and any change brought to ecosystems, economies and societies will alter the distribution of costs and benefits, creating other winners and losers among ecosystem services, sectors and people. While studies are increasingly acknowledging the prevalence of trade‐offs, this article analyses how practitioners working for conservation development agencies consider, facilitate and make trade‐off decisions a priori and post hoc when designing and implementing marine conservation development programmes in Southeast Asia. We find that these practitioners recognize both substantive trade‐offs, which are diverse social and ecological trade‐offs resulting from their programmes, and process trade‐offs, related to how they design programmes, including between their prioritization of different locations; between strategic relationships; and between the efficacy, equity and sustainability of projects. Existing decision support tools only capture a limited range of substantive (mainly ecological) trade‐offs, however, and are not widely used. Typically, social trade‐offs are not systematically assessed. Instead, they are implicitly identified by participants and beneficiaries voicing their concerns during consultation processes. Importantly, whether a trade‐off is then deemed acceptable is not determined through transparent assessment of trade‐offs and principles of equity or justice but by the uneven political power of stakeholders to project their values in decision‐making processes. The article concludes that practitioners should facilitate inclusive, transparent and systematic identification and deliberation of the social acceptability of multidimensional trade‐offs, and formulate response options to avoid or minimize adverse consequences. Tackling trade‐offs in this way has the potential to make invisible trade‐offs visible and improve the sustainability and legitimacy of marine conservation development programmes while promoting the interests of the most marginalized in efforts to achieve the sustainable development goals. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.