HRI Weekly Seminar Series - "Managing coral reefs for resilience in tropical developing countries"

This research compares top down and bottom up marine protected area (MPA) management in two Southeast Asian countries (Malaysia and Indonesia) along ecological and socio-economic variables. It finds that although ecological health shows minimal variation; resilience, adaptive capacity, and stakeholder buy-in are significantly higher among stakeholders in MPAs administered from the local scale through a form or power sharing known as "co-management." Lessons on co-management as a pathway to resilience from this research are critical to informing coral reef management in similar contexts.

Dr. Kelly Dunning holds a PhD in natural resource management from MIT and a masters in environmental policy from Oxford. Her research, funded by a U.S. Fulbright Award, was just published in a book titled "Managing Coral Reefs: An Ecological and Institutional Analysis of Ecosystem Services in Southeast Asia" (Anthem Press 2018). She currently manages the Coastal Training Program at the Mission Aransas National Estuarine Research Reserve and is a research scientist at the University of Texas Austin Marine Science Institute.