Abstract

Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are the most common management tool used for the conservation of marine resources. Although MPAs are well known as a tool for the preservation of biodiversity, there are large concerns about MPA place-ment due to the resulting displacement of fishing effort, when fishing rights are removed from those who traditionally fished within the area (Charles and Wilson 2009). In general, displacement is a problem that needs to be ‘dealt with’ even before it is quantified, which represents a large problem, given that the number of MPAs will inevitably increase in the following years in the race to meet the targets of the World Summit on Sustainable Development and United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity. Displacement will have the greatest social, economic, and ecological consequences when closures occur in core fishing grounds (Jennings 2013), which is not always the case. Additionally, in some circum-stances, displacement might not incur any great social conflict because the fishery has the ability to fish in other locations, a property that has been called spatial mobility (Cinner 2007).

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