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604 A. H. Himes

Currently, the EIMR is managed by the local government of Favignana. The mayor of
the local government is named President of the MPA and has responsibility of ensuring the
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presence of a director and the functioning of the MPA. The Trapani Harbor Master’s Office,
along with its sub-offices located on Marettimo and Favignana, has the responsibility for
enforcement of the regulatory framework of the MPA and all relevant regional and national
fishing regulations. Although the legislation that established the EIMR outlined main
objectives of the EIMR (i.e., environmental protection, public education, archaeological
preservation, research, and socioeconomic development), no management plan has been
written and little active management is undertaken (with the exception of limited patrols
around the no-entry zones).
With many residents dependent on fishing and marine resources (e.g., tourism, boating)
for their livelihoods and survival as an isolated community, the people of the Egadi Islands
have become the unintended victims of their government’s attempts at marine conservation.
Unfortunately, in most cases, the establishment of MPAs in Italy was done bureaucratically
at the Ministry of the Environment in Rome in concert only with local governments
and environmental organizations. Rarely have local peoples’ ideas or objections been
considered. In the Egadi Islands, the main proponents of the EIMR were local environmental
groups that successfully lobbied the Ministry of Environment to create a protected area that
eliminated the threat of oil drilling in local waters. Local residents and fishers were not
given the opportunity to comment on EIMR creation and most have adamantly opposed it
from the beginning. They feel that the EIMR, as it currently exists, is worthless and refuse
to believe it could benefit them in the long run under current management. Despite this,
however, most have commented that if the EIMR is managed “better” it will be a success
and benefit everyone (Himes, 2003).
To date, few biological studies have examined the performance of the EIMR in terms
of its ability to increase the biomass of local marine organisms. Furthermore, minimal
work has been done to determine the economic impacts and the sociocultural impacts of
the EIMR on local stakeholders (Bertolino et al., 2001; Himes, 2003; 2005; 2007). As a
result, a study comparing the performance indicators most important to local stakeholder
groups regarding the MPA is highly relevant.

A Multicriteria Approach
The AHP has become a widely applied MCA and preference elicitation method. Introduced
by Saaty (1977), it has been used in a variety of application areas to evaluate user preferences
based on the concept of paired comparison (Saaty & Vargas, 2004). The method calls for
a direct comparison between pairs of objectives in a decision-making problem, otherwise
known as making pairwise comparisons. Pairwise comparison generally refers to any
process of comparing entities in pairs to judge which of each pair is preferred, or has a
greater amount of some quantitative property. The method of pairwise comparison is used
in the scientific study of preferences, attitudes, voting systems, social choice, and public
choice. In the AHP, a respondent is asked to make all pairwise comparisons so that a priority
ranking can be made on a ratio scale for each objective. Four main steps have been identified
in using the AHP framework: (1) set up a hierarchy of performance indicators; (2) collect
data through a pairwise comparison survey regarding the preferences of individuals for the
indicators; (3) analyze individuals’ priority preferences; and (4) aggregate homogeneous
sets of preferences to derive a set of ratings for the indicators (e.g., Leung et al., 1998;
Mardle et al., 2004).