1. Introduction
The pressures from vulnerability, such as remoteness, insularity, proneness to natural disaster and competition over limited resources, directly affect the sustainability of a livelihood in small island areas [
1]. Such pressures, if not addressed, will lead to changes in resource use patterns, forming a continuous feedback loop that will threaten the sustainability of the island’s environment and its local community groups. Livelihood vulnerability of small island communities is generally overlooked by researchers, despite the growing literature on coastal vulnerability [
2]. Studies are usually based on ecological and economic approaches that consider external vulnerability factors, such as climate change or market failure, that influence small island community livelihoods. Research measuring local community risk perception regarding their livelihood vulnerability is rare or non-existent [
2,
3]. Many vulnerability studies lack an understanding of the ‘subjective vulnerability’ within a diverse local community [
4]. Subjective vulnerability relates to the different perceptions of people and their adaptive reaction or resilience to the impact of a particular event [
4]. Consequently, poverty programs and vulnerability interventions are too general to address or provide a solution to different scales of vulnerability risk within a diverse local community.
Furthermore, vulnerability studies of small islands commonly consider small-island developing states (SIDs), which were extensively discussed in the literature (e.g., [
1,
5,
6]). The lack of differentiation between the vulnerability characteristics of small islands and SIDs leads to the conception that small islands and SIDs have similar economic and geographical conditions. Therefore, a global approach to measuring the sustainability of SIDs is deemed valid to apply to small island contexts [
7]. However, within small island contexts, direct intervention from the central government (vertically) is relatively slow to address vulnerability risk due to remoteness and a weak governmental structure. In contrast, the governmental structure in SIDs is generally within the SIDs, which allows for faster responses to address vulnerability risks. This is in line with Kerr [
8], who argued that the strong economic and political autonomy of SIDs enables them to adapt to changing situations faster compared with the weak autonomy of small islands, which depend on the central government.
The vulnerability of protected natural resources has received more attention compared to the livelihood vulnerability that is faced by local communities in MPAs of both developed and developing countries. For example, fishers in the Maldives’ largest MPA [
9] and California’s MPAs [
10] have likely suffered from the fishing limitations that were imposed by the MPA authorities. Particularly in Indonesia, studies by Ferse et al. [
11] and Ferrol-Schulte et al. [
12] suggested that increased fisher livelihood vulnerabilities in small island MPAs due to natural resource degradation can be solved through population transmigration to other areas. This suggestion clearly favours the protection of the damaged natural ecosystems over recognising local fisher community rights and their attachment to their place and way of life. This view also fails to recognise the community diversity in which other non-fisher groups might have better adaptation and resilience to vulnerability risks. The generalisation of small island communities as fishers has been loosely used throughout Indonesia [
13]. As a result, other community groups, which have different perceptions and stronger adaptability to address vulnerability risks, are dissolved into weaker, but dominant, community groups [
4].
Numerous studies regarding the relationship between small island local communities and MPAs in Indonesia (such as [
11,
14,
15]) identified three main types of community groups, i.e., fishers, fish farmers and ecotourism operators, without undermining the importance of other groups. With such clear differentiation, there has not been any research that has attempted to study the specific vulnerability risks that are faced by each of these groups, nor have the groups been compared to one another. There are also no studies explaining the relationship between vulnerability risks and perception of these different community groups when establishing an MPA. This is important to study because MPA establishment has the potential to increase the vulnerability risks of local communities by prohibiting or limiting access to protected resources.
This study aimed to develop and compare the socially constructed livelihood vulnerability indicators (LVIs) of three different community groups and their influence on the community groups that do or do not support the MPA establishment. The socially constructed LVIs that were used here were based on a definition of vulnerability risks by Dolan and Walker [
2] and Kelly and Adger [
16], where individual or community perceptions construct the condition of vulnerability instead of the pressure from physical events. For this purpose, vulnerability was defined as the capacity of individuals or social groups to respond to, cope with, recover from and adapt to external stress on their livelihoods and well-being [
2,
16]. Besides the importance of unravelling the vulnerability risks from local community perceptions, the socially constructed LVIs were used here because hard data from assessing vulnerability risks in small islands in Indonesia are largely unavailable. This has been a challenge for many researchers who conduct vulnerability assessments in developing countries [
17]. In addition, this study also intended to provide a useful tool to examine the root causes of vulnerability based on the perception of different community groups in small island MPAs. Birkmann [
18] pointed out the need to study vulnerability risks at the local community level to balance the more common global study of vulnerability. In doing so, policy and intervention programs from the government, and other institutions, could be efficiently and effectively directed to manage vulnerability risks at a finer level, namely, the community level.
5. Conclusions
Efforts to measure the livelihood vulnerability of small island communities have been mostly based on economic and ecological approaches. Sometimes these studies are impossible to carry out due to the unavailability of hard data in less developed countries. This study successfully measured and compared the livelihood vulnerability of three small-scale community groups in the Anambas MPA using a set of socially constructed LVIs. The study also determined the groups’ perceptions regarding the establishment of the MPA, which has, in some ways, affected their livelihood.
This study confirmed that the livelihood vulnerability risk that is faced by small-scale community groups in small-island MPAs can be categorised as moderately vulnerable. Despite their similar vulnerability, fisher households were the most vulnerable among the groups, followed by fish farmers and ecotourism households. Natural risks, which were categorised using seasonal and shock indicators, severely affected the Anambas fisher and fish farmer groups. Particularly for fisher groups, the vulnerability risks will likely increase if the MPA regulations impose common fishing restrictions. The government could intervene by increasing the fishing efficiency of fisher groups by supporting their alternative livelihoods during times when fishing is not possible due to poor seasonal weather or other reasons. Fish farmer groups can cope with the pressures of natural risks better than fisher groups because the fish farmers can be more flexible and obtain alternate livelihood inputs. Ecotourism households were the least vulnerable in the Anambas MPA due to their non-extractive activity. Further government intervention to promote the MPA as a tourist destination and gradually reducing the dependency of ecotourism households on government-backed programs will strengthen the resilience of this community group.
The three household groups had similar general views that the MPA provided benefits that were directly related to their livelihoods, such as improving fish stocks and preventing illegal fishing. However, the government and MPA authority might have to invest more effort and resources to increase fisher compliance to the MPA regulations. In addition, issues of trust between the members of the groups should be a concern for the MPA authority. The view that someone’s obedience to the law is someone else’s chance to break it is still pervasive within the three household groups, especially with fishers. With the limited resources and staff available in most Indonesian MPAs, building trust between community members that are similarly dependent on the MPA resources is a great challenge that is yet to be resolved.
The findings from this study indicated that small-scale mariculture in Indonesia has been integrated within the MPA regulation framework. The findings also showed that small-scale mariculture was economically and culturally important to small-island MPA communities and had a sustainability profile comparable to ecotourism and small-scale fisheries. Nevertheless, the current regulatory framework lacked a means to formally designate mariculture zones within multi-use MPAs. In order to solve this issue, a site suitability framework could be used to determine mariculture zones for small-scale mariculture in a multi-use MPA. We acknowledge that this study has limitations in terms of sample size and the opinions influenced by the presence of a third person during the face-to-face interviews. Both limitations were unavoidable but minimally affected the results of the study.