Financing Marine Protected Areas for a Sustainable and Equitable Ocean: A Narrative Review

Abstract The narrative review attempts to integrate the literature on conservation finance of MPAs and its impacts on the effectiveness and equity of ocean governance. It attempts to bring both traditional and innovative financial instruments under the common analytical framework of conservation-finance, blue-economy, political-economy and decolonial. A total of 100 papers were selected from systematic searches of Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar (2000–2025) and additional sources through grey literature and snowball sampling. The literature is categorised under six categories of financing mechanisms, namely public budgetary finance, market-based user finance, official development assistance and philanthropic grants, debt-for-nature swaps, blue bonds, and blue carbon and climate finance along with the wider discussion on blue economy. Governance and management effectiveness, including the 'paper parks' problem, are treated as the condition determining whether finance yields effective protection. According to the literature review, the growth of MPAs in the context of the 30x30 initiative has been faster than the finances and capabilities to manage the increase in MPAs. Small scale fishers, coastal communities and Indigenous peoples have been shouldering the majority of the cost burden. Equity is more commonly stated than studied within the corpus.