Managing Space without Managing People : The Marine Protected Areas’ Dilemma (a View from Saloum, Senegal)
Despite participatory approaches used to define management plan and zoning of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), successful local governance of marine resources is not frequent. The recurrent conflicts between local users of resources and management bodies are largely due to a lack of attention to social, economical and ecological contexts in designing MPAs. Notwithstanding the promotion of decentralized methods of natural resources’ management, many MPAs don’t achieve their goals because they are not able to take into account the diversity and complexity of local uses. Worse, they weaken the autochthonous control of marine territories and generate inequalities. The case study of Saloum delta’s MPA in Senegal illustrates this paradox.