The Shark Reef Marine Reserve: a marine tourism project in Fiji involving local communities

The Shark Reef Marine Reserve in Fiji is an ecotourism project designed to protect a small reef patch and its fauna while preserving the livelihood of local communities. It involves the local communities by using a participatory business planning approach to Marine Protected Area management, generating income through diver user fees, distributed to the local villages that have exchanged their traditional fishing rights in the marine reserve for this new source of income. The Shark Reef Marine Reserve is a self-sustaining and profitable project, and is an example of a privately initiated, bottom-up approach, which includes all relevant stakeholders in an area where marine rights are finely subdivided into small units.