Despite a growing body of literature on integrated land–sea management (ILSM), very little critical assessment has been conducted in order to evaluate ILSM in practice on island systems. Here we develop indicators for assessing 10 integrated island management principles and evaluate the performance of planning and implementation in four island ILSM projects from the tropical Pacific across different governance structures. We find that where customary governance is still strongly respected and enabled through national legislation, ILSM in practice can be very effective at restricting access and use according to fluctuations in resource availability. However, decision-making under customary governance systems may be vulnerable to mismanagement. Government-led ILSM processes have the potential to design management actions that address the spatial scale of ecosystem processes and threats within the context of national policy and legislation, but may not fully capture broad stakeholder interests, and implementation may be poorly coordinated across highly dispersed island archipelagos. Private sector partnerships offer unique opportunities for resourcing island ILSM, although these are highly likely to be geared towards private sector interests that may change in the future and no longer align with community and/or national objectives. We identify consistent challenges that arise during island ILSM planning and implementation and offer recommendations for improvement.

Important changes are needed to disciplinary theories and methods to support interdisciplinary and integrated ocean and coastal management policies and implementation. This review argues that theories and methods should conform to a perspective that ocean management is a societal activity with diverse goals ideally informed by interdisciplinary information. The review focuses on the integrated coastal management (ICM) and marine ecosystem-based management (EBM) frameworks and the marine protected areas (MPA) management tool. It begins by suggesting that at present there is a notable imbalance in the degree of effort allocated to monitoring the ecological and social dimensions of ocean resource use and policy processes. Based on how Western society and an influential epistemic community construct ‘the environment’ and society's relation to the environment, natural sciences play an inordinately important role in the description of the problem and policy recommendations. The discourse advocating for a global networks of marine protected areas, without adequate consideration of society impacts and responses, represents an example of this imbalance. Rebalancing the contributions of scientific disciplines encounters various dilemmas with epistemological, methodological and sociological dimensions. The analysis concludes with suggestions for balancing ocean and coastal interdisciplinary research and reframing key issues, creating self reflexive and multidisciplinary research teams, and reworking educational programmes.

Local user perceptions of resource trajectory and indicators of protected area outcomes can be useful in the assessment of integrated conservation projects, both marine and terrestrial. In-depth stakeholder surveys using 12 performance indicators were used to evaluate the perceived outcomes of the Sagay Marine Reserve (SMR), the Philippines. These indicators were a measure of whether the SMR had achieved its management objectives in the recent past and what local stakeholders expected in the future. The respondents' contextual situation could be correlated with their perceptions of SMR indicators. There was a generally high level of perceived equity and efficiency of SMR management outcomes, but the sustainability of the SMR, particularly the condition of the fisheries, had been poor over the previous 10 years. Few anticipated an improvement in sustainability indicators over the next 10 years. Respondents from an island village within the SMR had more negative (or less positive) perceptions of SMR outcomes because of their high dependence on the degraded resource, combined with physical and economic isolation. Specific remedies to enhance island villagers' satisfaction, such as greater participation, empowerment, alternative economic opportunities and fisheries protection, and replenishment, are necessary. This research serves as an example of how indicators perceived by local resource-accessing stakeholders can and should be main components of both marine and terrestrial protected area assessment.