Incentives for coastal conservation and fisheries management

Coastal resource management and conservation can support sustainable aquatic food systems, with long-term benefits for people, nature and climate. But these interventions often impose costs on coastal communities – for example, a temporary loss of income or food. 

These costs are not only an issue of social equity, but they can also undermine efforts to protect and restore coastal ecosystems and to manage resources for sustainability. 

This can be addressed through incentives, a set of tools to promote stewardship among resource users and strengthen regulatory approaches to conservation and management. 

These can be provided to individuals or communities through a range of different mechanisms, including social protection and labour market systems or payments for ecosystem services. 

Incentives can be directly linked to specific behaviours – such as compliance with a closed fishing season – or they can indirectly incentivise or enable conservation and sustainable use by reducing vulnerability and building resilience. Examples of indirect incentives are measures that strengthen and diversify coastal livelihoods, develop sustainable markets for marine resources, and secure tenure or other rights of fishing communities.

However, there are challenges around incentives that limit their effectiveness and their uptake, particularly in the marine environment:

• There is lack of rigorous impact evaluation, and unintended consequences are underexplored
• Effectiveness is often limited by a lack of attention to equitable governance, and 
• Innovative financing strategies are required.

What is IIED doing?

IIED is working with partners to enable more effective and more equitable coastal conservation and fisheries management by assessing and strengthening incentive-based approaches, with a focus on Mozambique, Tanzania and Bangladesh. The project has four main objectives:

1. Build knowledge of opportunities and challenges around incentive-based approaches to coastal conservation and fisheries management, along with capacity for their design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation 
2. Strengthen institutional and policy environments for incentive-based approaches to coastal conservation and fisheries management in Mozambique, Tanzania and Bangladesh 
3. Strengthen incentives for conservation and management of selected coastal areas in the target countries, including through impact evaluation and improvements in governance and equity, and 
4. Ensure financial sustainability of selected incentive-based approaches in the target countries.

This work builds on learning from previous IIED projects, including efforts to strengthen an incentive-based approach to hilsa fisheries management in Bangladesh and to design a similar approach in Myanmar. 

It also draws lessons from IIED’s global work with the World Bank to leverage social protection and labour market systems, policies and programmes as a means of incentivising more sustainable fisheries management.

The project is part of the Asia-Africa BlueTech Superhighway (AABS) initiative led by WorldFish (2023-30) under the UK’s Climate and Ocean Adaptation and Sustainable Transition (COAST) Programme of the Blue Planet Fund. 

While our primary goal is to strengthen incentives in the target countries, in the longer term we aim to support scaling of evidence-based incentive models across Asia and Africa through South-South knowledge exchange and collaboration.