Synthesising ecological, socioeconomic, and governance guidelines for designing Marine Protected Areas

Designing successful, equitable, and just marine protected areas (MPAs) requires integrated consideration of ecological, socioeconomic, and governance dimensions. Such an integrative approach to MPA design is critical as countries establish more MPAs in line with the 30 × 30 initiative. We reviewed and synthesised 574 design guidelines across 62 peer-reviewed and grey literature publications to assess the extent to which ecological, socioeconomic, and/or governance guidelines are integrated in current MPA design. We identified a total of 26 broad guidelines (i.e., 9 ecological, 12 socioeconomic, and 5 governance) across a variety of MPA objectives. We found that documents that included only ecological guidelines were the most frequently used (60 %), followed by socioeconomic (3 %) and governance guidelines (3 %). Almost 20 % of the documents combined ecological guidelines with socioeconomic guidelines, while only 8 % combined ecological guidelines with governance guidelines. Fewer than 7 % of documents combined all three to achieve MPA objectives. Adequacy often co-occurs with Connectivity , Comprehensiveness , and/or Ecological Importance among the ecological guidelines. Similarly, Equity frequently co-occurs with Cultural Identity and/or Social Context in papers reporting socioeconomic guidelines. Such a pattern could not be established for governance guidelines due to the low number of documents with governance guidelines. While our results reveal an imbalance and a lack of integrative MPA design, with the prevailing MPA design guidelines being ecologically driven, our synthesis of MPA design guidelines across different MPA objectives provides opportunities for integrating these guidelines towards a holistic MPA design that benefits both nature and people. • Current MPA design practices favour ecological guidelines. • Considerably less attention is given to socioeconomic and governance guidelines. • Governance is the least integrated in MPA design. • Need for better integration of ecological, socioeconomic, and governance guidelines.