The governance of marine protected areas (MPAs) in Indonesia has undergone major changes over the past half-century. The system of centralized, technocratic management used in the 1970s and 1980s has since given way to a more community-focused approach. In the early 1990s, a series of natural resource management programs inspired by the community- based protected area programs in the Philippines were initiated with international support (White, Alino and Meneses 2006). Several collaborative management programs were subsequently established in support of the national parks and large-scale protected areas that form the basis for networks of MPAs across the Indonesian archipelago and in the Coral Triangle. These programs explicitly sought to address the problem of limited participation of local people that characterized the earlier system (TNC et al. 2008).

Using Komodo National Park as a case study, this chapter describes the collaborative management regime in Indonesian MPAs. It examines the ways in which government institutions and groups of resource users have shared responsibility for the park's management, as well as the influence of external factors on the governance and performance of the park. The chapter sheds light on the underlying assumptions and challenges associated with the implementation of collaborative management practices in Komodo National Park.

INDONESIA's MARINE PROTECTED AREAS

Healthy marine resources require healthy, intact ecosystems. Productive marine and coastal ecosystems are a source of goods and services that support communities and economies, including food security, tourism opportunities and coastal protection. They also help to maintain the full range of genetic variation that is essential to securing viable populations of key species, to sustaining evolutionary processes and to ensuring resilience in the face of natural and human disturbances (Agardy and Staub 2006; IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas 2008).

The Dutch colonial government established the first MPAs in the Indonesian archipelago, usually small areas of 1–2 hectares such as the Pulau Pombo reserve in Maluku. In the 1970s and 1980s, the central government undertook a massive expansion of national parks and nature reserves under the auspices of the Ministry of Forestry's Directorate General of Forest Protection and Nature Conservation. Most of the national parks created during this period were on land, but some, such as Komodo National Park, covered marine areas.