ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
The right incentives enable ocean sustainability successes and provide hope for the future.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers.
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Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed.
- Casting light on the workings of illegal fishing markets.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Business for ocean sustainability: Early responses of ocean governance in the private sector.Ambio · 2023Article
- Scientific mobilization of keystone actors for biosphere stewardship.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Causal Approach to Determining the Environmental Risks of Seabed Mining.Environmental science & technology · 2021Article
- Financing a sustainable ocean economy.Nature communications · 2021Review
- Our future in the Anthropocene biosphere.Ambio · 2021Review
- The Ocean 100: Transnational corporations in the ocean economy.Science advances · 2021Article
- Five priorities for a sustainable ocean economy.Nature · 2020Article
- Floristic Changes in the Understory Vegetation of Mixed Temperate New England Freshwater Island Forests over a Period of 33 Years.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Article
- A transition to sustainable ocean governance.Nature communications · 2020Review
- Rebuilding marine life.Nature · 2020Review
- Understanding Social-Ecological Challenges of a Small-Scale Hilsa (Tenualosa ilisha) Fishery in Bangladesh.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2019Article
- Review
- Transnational corporations and the challenge of biosphere stewardship.Nature ecology & evolution · 2019Review
- Private provision of public goods by environmental groups.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- Opinion: Governing the recreational dimension of global fisheries.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- Path-dependent institutions drive alternative stable states in conservation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- Moving beyond panaceas in fisheries governance.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
- Status-quo management of marine recreational fisheries undermines angler welfare.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
- Environmental Stewardship: A Conceptual Review and Analytical Framework.Environmental management · 2018Review
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4 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Healthy ocean ecosystems are needed to sustain people and livelihoods and to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Using the ocean sustainably requires overcoming many formidable challenges: overfishing, climate change, ocean acidification, and pollution. Despite gloomy forecasts, there is reason for hope. New tools, practices, and partnerships are beginning to transform local fisheries, biodiversity conservation, and marine spatial planning. The challenge is to bring them to a global scale. We dissect recent successes using a complex adaptive-systems (CAS) framework, which acknowledges the interconnectedness of social and ecological systems. Understanding how policies and practices change the feedbacks in CASs by altering the behavior of different system components is critical for building robust, sustainable states with favorable emergent properties. Our review reveals that altering incentives-either economic or social norms, or both-can achieve positive outcomes. For example, introduction of well-designed rights-based or secure-access fisheries and ecosystem service accounting shifts economic incentives to align conservation and economic benefits. Modifying social norms can create conditions that incentivize a company, country, or individual to fish sustainably, curb illegal fishing, or create large marine reserves as steps to enhance reputation or self-image. In each example, the feedbacks between individual actors and emergent system properties were altered, triggering a transition from a vicious to a virtuous cycle. We suggest that evaluating conservation tools by their ability to align incentives of actors with broader goals of sustainability is an underused approach that can provide a pathway toward scaling sustainability successes. In short, getting incentives right matters.
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