Tracking the Debate Around Marine Protected Areas: Key Issuesand the BEG Framework

Marine conservation is often criticized for amono-disciplinary approach, which delivers fragmentedsolutions to complex problems with differing interpretationsof success. As a means of reflecting on the breadthand range of scientific research on the management of themarine environment, this paper develops an analyticalframework to gauge the foci of policy documents andpublished scientific work on Marine Protected Areas. Weevaluate the extent to which MPA research articles delineateobjectives around three domains: biological-ecological[B]; economic-social[E]; and governance-management[G]. This permits us to develop an analytic [BEG] frameworkwhich we then test on a sample of selected journalarticle cohorts. While the framework reveals the dominanceof biologically focussed research [B], analysis alsoreveals a growing frequency of the use of governance/management terminology in the literature over the last15 years, which may be indicative of a shift towards moreintegrated consideration of governance concerns. However,consideration of the economic/social domain appears to lagbehind biological and governance concerns in both frequencyand presence in MPA literature.