Marine reserves and resilience in the era of COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced coastal communities around the world to re-evaluate their approaches to marine conservation and marine protected area (MPA) management. Initial studies have called for the need for improved socio-ecological resilience of MPAs in order to improve the adaptive capacity of communities and ecosystems to respond to future crises. However, as posed by Armitage and Johnson (2006), it is critical that MPA managers ask the question ‘for what and for whom are we trying to promote resilience?’ in designing more resilient MPAs for a post-pandemic world. Based on a systematic literature review of marine reserve impacts supported by fieldwork conducted in the Wakatobi National Park in Indonesia over the course of the COVID-19 crisis, this study examines what opportunities for transformations in MPA management and governance have emerged. Our findings demonstrate how top-down approaches to resilience-based management fail to synchronize with local realities, ultimately subverting potential for system transformation and a reimagining of MPA capacity to better serve local communities. Ultimately, this paper concludes that planning for resilience in MPAs must explicitly acknowledge local politics and power dynamics in order to understand how trade-offs impact stakeholders, and who gains and who loses from a more resilient system.