A recently published study led by Claudia Scianna of Université Nice Sophia Antipolis, France says that the effectiveness of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) varies dramatically and that much of the variability in the effectiveness of MPAs remains unexplained.

The authors of ‘Organization Science’: A new prospective to assess marine protected areas effectiveness, which was published in the November 2015 issue of Ocean & Coastal Management, reviewed available literature on MPAs and Organization Science (OS) to analyze whether and how “the principles of OS have been used as a scientific basis for the evaluation of MPA effectiveness.”

They found that, overall, no studies comprehensively used OS to assess MPAs effectiveness. They concluded that OS is a promising approach but its implementation in the context of MPAs is still limited.

According the paper’s abstract, “The outputs of our review stress the limited use of the OS methodologies and principles in the context of MPAs so far. We posit that there is a significant potential for new insights in MPA science thanks to a more integrated implementation of an OS framework for the interpretation and improvement of MPA socio-ecological effectiveness.”