Incentives for coastal conservation and fisheries management

Coastal resource management, conservation and restoration 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 interventions that offer positive economic incentives for coastal stewardship by resource users, enabling or motivating behaviour change by reducing the associated costs or increasing the benefits.

These incentives can be provided to individuals or communities through a range of different tools, including social protection, subsidies, market-based tools such as payments for ecosystem services, or rights-based interventions.

Incentive-based interventions can be directly linked to specific actions such as compliance with a closed fishing season. They can also indirectly enable stewardship by strengthening capacity for stewardship, or by altering contextual factors that enable or undermine capacity (i.e. economic, social, or regulatory environments), which, in turn, motivates actions. 

Examples of indirect incentives are measures that strengthen and diversify coastal livelihoods and develop sustainable markets for marine resources, reducing overall vulnerability and building resilience.

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 through locally appropriate 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, including best practices for their design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation
2. Strengthen institutional, legal and policy frameworks for incentive-based approaches to coastal conservation and fisheries management in Mozambique, Tanzania and Bangladesh
3. Strengthen incentives for conservation and management of select coastal areas in the target countries, including through designing, evaluating, and adapting interventions, and
4. Ensure financial sustainability of selected incentive-based interventions 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 and methods 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.