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Navy Journal 2019

concerned authority to improve maintenance of MPA (Weible, 2008). Research
also suggests that understanding the association of demographic and social
factors with their environmental awareness and perceptions can provide valuable
understandings to increase management efficiency (Trenouth et al., 2012 and
Gleason, et al., 2010).

Having peoples’ negative perception coupled with socioeconomic factors
of fishing communities suggest that implementation of MPA would be very
difficult as the MPA is far out of sight. Moreover, socioeconomic condition of the
people would not allow them to remain without fishing for their livelihoods.
Therefore, there should be some alternative arrangements that would provide job
and means for their livelihood (Muallil et al., 2013).
As explained above, often MPAs are exposed to a number of
human-generated hazards like grounding, pollution from oil spill, bilge
(burned/waste oil) discharge, sewerage, waste material specially polythene etc.
These hazards also threaten the success of MPA for which both managers and
stakeholders need to understand the challenges. If human activity is the cause of
hazards, then people undertaking those activities need to be educated to avert,
halt and mitigate hazards. (Trenouth et al., 2012). Accordingly, Kuhar et al.,
(2009) suggested that management can formulate effective education programs
by understanding the driving factors that address people’s perceptions of hazard.
In the book titled “Marine Transboundary Conservation and Protected
Areas” edited by Peter Mackelworth argued that economic loss due to depleted
fish stock is too high for small scale fisheries. Authors stated that imposing
restriction on fishing for conservation of area to recover the living resources will
be more burdensome for the said fishers. Authors suggested that introduction of
compensation or payment to affected communities would provide incentives to
attract users to actively participate in implementing protected areas
(Mackelworth, 2016).
Imperative for an Empirical Study in Bangladesh

Marine resource beneficiaries like fishermen, seafarers are always happy to
have protection of resources for their benefit, but they usually object when
question of sacrifice comes showing many logics and excuses. Even it is seen
during national and regional meetings/ discussions that Bangladesh fisher groups
protest whenever a restriction or protected area is proposed (IUCN, 2015).

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