Seaweed farming, property rights, and inclusive development in coastal areas Arif Satria a, * , Nur Hannah Muthohharoh a , Rinto Andhi Suncoko a , Istiqlaliyah Muflikhati b a Department of Communication and Community Development Sciences, Faculty of Human Ecology, Bogor Agricultural University, Indonesia b Department of Family and Consumer Science, Faculty of Human Ecology, Bogor Agricultural University, Indonesia article info Article history: Received 9 June 2016 Received in revised form 9 September 2017 Accepted 13 September 2017 Available online xxx Keywords: Seaweed farming Marine conservation areas Property rights system Coastal management Inclusive development 1. Introduction In the light of environmental deterioration of coastal and marine regions, the international community has been recommending the expansion of marine protected areas (MPA) (Gurney et al., 2014; Hugenholtz and McKenzie, 2015). The government of Indonesia has supported this effort by establishing many new MPAs, also in populated coastal regions (Clifton, 2003; Gurney et al., 2014; Kusumawati and Hsiang-Wen, 2015; Chui-Ling, 2015). This paper compares two MPA sites, focusing on the extent to which the local people have been involved in planning and implementation (Glaser et al., 2010; Chui-Ling, 2015; Raymond-Yakoubian et al., 2017; Ban et al., 2017). We compare two MPAs with different regimes, i.e Karimunjawa National Park under Ministry of Forestry (MoF) regime and the Savu Sea Marine National Park under Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries (MMAF) regime. In both cases, the local people have also been encouraged to engage in seaweed farming. The practice of seaweed farming is, however, sometimes antithetical to the rules employed for conservation, potentially resulting in conflict. The question guiding this paper therefore is the following: how can top-down coastal management systems be synchronized with local realities in the coastal zone? In particular we ask: How does the formal property rights framework regarding seaweed production in two MPA's in Indonesia interact with local customary practices and rules and how can the former support the latter to enhance local farmer well-being and protect local ecosystems? Our entry point is inclusive development, defined as develop- ment that includes marginalized people, sectors and countries in social, political and economic processes for increased human well- being, social and environmental sustainability, and empowerment (Gupta et al., 2015). Inclusive development is considered to be an adaptive learning process, which responds to change and new risks of exclusion and marginalization. The imposition of conservation areas, such as MPAs, which are expected to result in environmental sustainability, may also result in local processes of social exclusion (Fiske, 1991; Coklin et al., 1998; Visser, 2004; Mascia and Claus, 2008). The realization of conservation areas that take account of the necessities of social inclusion is from this perspective a major challenge (Voyer et al., 2014; Martin et al., 2017; Yunzhou and Fluharty, 2017). We also make use of a property rights perspective (Ostrom and Schlager, 1996). Ostrom and Schlager (1996) distinguish five types of property rights, i.e. access rights, withdrawal rights, manage- ment rights, exclusion rights, and alienation rights, and also iden- tify five types of users: authorized entrant, authorized user, claimant, proprietor, and owner. They argue that property rights occur in ‘bundles’, and may take different shapes, depending on the local context. The paper is set up as follows. Section 2 provides an overview of the Indonesian policy context, examining the characteristics of marine conservation policy as well as the national endeavour to encourage seaweed farming in coastal regions. Section 3 describes the research methodology and research settings, while Section 4 provides a window to the interaction between seaweed farming and conservation policy in two case study regions, namely Kar- imunjawa National Park, in western Indonesia, and Savu Sea Marine * Corresponding author. Faculty of Human Ecology, Kamper Street, Bogor Agri- cultural University, Dramaga, Bogor, West Java, Indonesia. E-mail addresses: arifsatria@ipb.ac.id, arifsatria.fema@gmail.com, arifsatria@ apps.ipb.ac.id (A. Satria). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Ocean & Coastal Management journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ocecoaman https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ocecoaman.2017.09.009 0964-5691/© 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Ocean & Coastal Management xxx (2017) 1e12 Please cite this article in press as: Satria, A., et al., Seaweed farming, property rights, and inclusive development in coastal areas, Ocean & Coastal Management (2017), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ocecoaman.2017.09.009