In the Asia-Pacific region, significant expanses of coral have been restored since 2020. Local human pressure, including fishing, can compromise restoration. Ecological restoration produces variable results depending on whether local governance arrangements accompany technical replanting. Customary co-management at Raja Ampat in Indonesia illustrates an approach that aligns recognition of rights, delegation of control, and funding for protection.
The essentials
- Lasting results require a combination of pressure reduction, participation, monitoring, and adaptive management; clarity of local governance frameworks appears associated with protection trajectories.
- Restoration is more vulnerable when local pressures, including fishing, persist without regulation.
- Customary co-management at Raja Ampat combines traditional tenure and state legal recognition: co-managed protected areas show ecological recovery in protected zones.
- The absence of a clear governance framework exposes restored sites to overexploitation risks, facing climate threats and fishing pressure.
- The issue is as much political as ecological: governance of access to a restored reef can influence its survival, but it is not the sole determining factor.
Restoring a reef is not enough to protect it
Coral biology has advanced rapidly. Underwater nurseries, fragmentation of heat-resistant colonies, replanting on artificial substrates: these techniques work. Reefs that bleaching episodes had reduced to calcified skeletons are recovering living cover. This is real, measurable progress, documented at multiple sites in the Pacific and Indian Ocean.
The problem comes after. A restored reef without clear legal status can be exposed to competing uses, according to the rules applicable in the relevant jurisdiction. The resource, reconstituted at great cost, can be subject to competing uses governed by the logic of the tragedy of the commons described by Garrett Hardin in 1968, where each user has an incentive to extract before others, if no governance framework regulates access.
Unredressed local pressures, including fishing, can compromise a restored reef. The absence of governance can undermine restoration results. Neighboring ecosystems had already paid the price: as a previous article in the journal on Asian forests and reefs documented, anthropogenic pressure on these ecosystems does not ease of its own accord.
Rights of use determine a reef’s future
A right of use is not a property title in the sense of Western civil law. In Pacific archipelagos, customary systems have long defined who can fish where, when, and with what equipment. These regimes, often transmitted orally and enforced socially, constitute a form of commons governance that anthropologist Elinor Ostrom formalized in her work on community self-organization—work for which she received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009.
The contemporary problem stems from the collision between these customary regimes and modern states that have, often during the colonial period, nationalized maritime zones without recognizing preexisting rights. Coral restoration arrives in a context where states assert their sovereignty over waters, and community access rights may be recognized, limited, or contested depending on national and local legal frameworks.
Two consequences follow. First, local control can strengthen incentives to protect, without determining by itself the motivations of all communities. Investing labor and attention in monitoring a reef that a third party can legally appropriate the benefits from is economically irrational. Second, the legality of access for external operators—industrial fisheries, cruise operators, coral sand extraction companies—depends on permits, customary rights, protected areas, and applicable laws. Poorly designed restoration can leave exploitation risks in place, but this consequence is not inherent to restoration funding.
Raja Ampat as proof of concept
The Raja Ampat district in Indonesia’s West Papua illustrates a documented approach to co-management in a coral zone. The reefs of this archipelago rank among the world’s richest in terms of marine biodiversity: several thousand fish species, an exceptional density of coral colonies even after bleaching episodes in 2016 and 2019-2020.
Raja Ampat combines institutional architecture and management methods with ecological restoration. The Indonesian government has recognized the customary rights of Papuan communities over maritime zones adjacent to their villages. The sasi regulates periods of closure and opening as well as access to resources and species concerned; rules applicable to outside visitors vary locally. Community maritime guards participate in access control.
Results are measurable. Raja Ampat’s co-managed protected areas show documented ecological recovery in protected zones, contrasting with other configurations. The density of herbivorous fish, essential to maintaining coral health because they prevent algae from smothering corals, remains sustained. Raja Ampat’s institutional approach serves as a reference for other Pacific archipelagos.
Co-management at Raja Ampat aligns recognition of customary rights, delegation of authority by the state, and sources of funding for protection, notably dive tourism and conservation subsidies.
Fiji and Vanuatu’s attempts facing institutional obstacles
Fiji and Vanuatu have developed their own approaches to customary maritime tenure, with more mixed results. Fiji’s qoliqoli system—maritime zones under customary clan authority—has had a legal basis since the British colonial period, but its application remains uneven. Sites where qoliqoli are actively managed show controlled management profiles, contrasting with some nominally protected sites lacking effective surveillance.
Vanuatu presents a different situation. The Constitution recognizes that all land belongs to indigenous customary owners and that custom grounds their property and use. Uncertainties may persist regarding how these rights apply to maritime zones. Coral restoration projects funded by international NGOs, often in partnership with dive operators, operate in multiple contexts where access to restored sites and community authority present uncertainties.
Settling maritime tenure in archipelagos where boundaries between villages, between islands, and vis-à-vis the state are complex requires considerable political and legal investment. Pacific island governments face severe budget constraints and substantial institutional obstacles. The institutional gap has a real cost, but it does not appear as a budgetary urgency in national budgets.
The likely situation between 2035 and 2040 absent any decision
The question of coral usage rights will not be resolved by ecological dynamics alone. Ecological restoration does not automatically produce the institutional frameworks necessary for sustainable protection. The coming years will present a combination of risks: intensification of thermal bleaching linked to rising ocean temperatures, and increased industrial fishing pressure in zones difficult to monitor.
Without institutional decision-making, a risk exists of restoration in a loop: NGOs and donor states finance coral replanting programs, local communities participate in the technical effort, and sites can subsequently be overexploited if no governance framework protects the gains. Risks of overexploitation after restoration exist if no governance framework protects the sites. Some projects may fail or produce temporary benefits, justifying rigorous project-by-project evaluation of results.
Two alternative trajectories are documented in literature on blue justice, a notion designating equitable distribution of rights and benefits from marine resources, developed notably in work published in Nature Sustainability in 2024-2025. One possible trajectory consists of recognizing and legally articulating customary rights with public management. This approach may require legal recognition of customary rights, clarification of competent authorities, and public support, but its formalization methods vary by context. The second passes through climate finance mechanisms that directly compensate communities for blue carbon sequestration and marine biodiversity protection, with reefs recognized as carbon sinks and barriers against coastal erosion. Blue carbon credits constitute an emerging lever, but their integrity rests on clarity of usage and management rights.
Signals to monitor through the end of the decade are identifiable. Progress in national legal frameworks in the Pacific island states—Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands—will constitute an early indicator. The capacity of climate finance programs, notably mechanisms from Dubai’s agreements on marine ecosystems, to assign clear rights to local communities is another. And the evolution of pilot co-management sites, at Raja Ampat as in experimental zones in French Polynesia’s Tuamotu, will provide elements for evaluating the model.
Coral reefs protect hundreds of millions of people in the Asia-Pacific from storms and erosion. They support food, fisheries, income, and coastal protection for many communities; the level of economic alternatives varies by territory. Restoration without adapted governance can be vulnerable, but its property status and access rules depend on applicable law.
Other levers available to donors and NGOs
The marine conservation world has long separated biological work—restoring corals—from institutional work—clarifying who manages them. Several programs combine technical restoration and local governance processes, seeking to align both dimensions from design onward.
This methodological shift has budget implications. Documenting customary rights, training community maritime guards, facilitating negotiations with local governments: this costs more in the short term than coral fragment replanting alone. But the cost of restoration lost—funded, completed, then erased—is higher still. Some governments, including Fiji, are exploring integration of local governance criteria into restoration project calls.
This logic could extend to major climate donors. Funds dedicated to marine biodiversity conservation, whether public like the Green Climate Fund or private like major American foundations active in the Pacific, have the capacity to impose institutional conditions on their funding. Not as bureaucratic constraint, but as a condition for long-term investment effectiveness. A reef protected for five years then abandoned to overfishing does not constitute a conservation result: it is spending without return.
Coral restoration in the Asia-Pacific has proven technical feasibility. The next frontier is institutional. Governance of a restored reef and clarity of usage rights influence protection sustainability and long-term ecological viability of the site.
Sources
- Coral Reef Alliance, Pacific Community Conservation Initiative
- IUCN, Coral Reef Alliance Programme 2026, field data Fiji & Vanuatu
- Fiji Ministry of Fisheries, data on maritime tenure and qoliqoli
- Nature Sustainability, publications 2024-2025 on blue justice and usage rights in marine ecosystems
- Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons (Cambridge University Press, 1990)
- Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science, 1968
