Avoiding “Paper Parks”: A Global Literature Review on Socioeconomic Factors Underpinning the Effectiveness of Marine Protected Areas

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are a common management tool for preserving marine biodiversity and halting resource depletion. Despite the number of MPAs rapidly increasing worldwide, there are concerns over the full achievement of their objectives. Indeed, in some cases—the phenomenon of so-called “paper parks”—protected areas totally fail to achieve their conservation and socioeconomic targets. Therefore, identifying the factors underpinning MPA success or failure is crucial to increase their effectiveness. To achieve this goal, we performed a global literature review on the socioeconomic factors that managers should pursue to enhance MPA effectiveness on a global scale. A search of the Scopus database, using strings of keywords connected by Boolean operators, generated a batch of 715 items, out of which 68 were retained after the application of inclusion/exclusion criteria. Six other articles were added through the scanning of the literature cited in selected papers. We grouped MPA success-factors into 13 main groups and ranked them according to the frequency of citation in the literature. Our findings identify stakeholder involvement, increasing communication and awareness between specific stakeholder groups, as well as ensuring appropriate enforcement and monitoring, control and surveillance, as the leading factors for MPA success. Our results will assist in the process of upcoming global expansion of MPAs, thus contributing to improving conservation of marine biodiversity and associated livelihoods.