The recent studies say that balance between cooperation and competition exists almost everywhere, even in communities that are not subject to the restrictions of protected areas.

In a coastal community with no fishing restrictions most community members use to rely on fishing for their livelihoods and thus main part of them are in the same boat. However, when a marine protected area is established and fishing becomes subject to greater restrictions, some community members may turn to other livelihoods, such as tourism — and may become more successful than some community members who stuck with fishing.

When these different opportunities open up, it can result in a kind of income inequality in the community that did not exist before. This phenomenon can drive up competition among the community members. But it can also drive up cooperation.

The games in this particular study included both fishers and non-fishers in the community and found that both groups exhibited an increase in prosocial and antisocial behaviour within the marine protected areas. This suggests that while the different groups may be competing with one another, they also band together when it’s necessary for the sake of the community — and their competition doesn’t prevent them from doing so.

So in this way, a healthy balance between competition and cooperation isn’t necessarily a bad thing. And in fact, such balances are commonly observed in nature. This study indicates that, like natural systems, having intense competitors within a cooperative network are potentially key to its stability.

But the intensification of both cooperation and competition in a community may also indicate the emergence of social inequalities, which is an issue policymakers should be careful to take into account when designing protected areas. And if these social systems were to degrade in the future, it could threaten the success of the protected area.

We can see that in other places where social inequality continues to increase, that could have negative effects on social cohesion and suddenly the antisocial behaviour breaks the balance and predominates over prosocial behaviour. The implications for marine protected areas is that when they’re established attention needs to be paid to issues of social inequality or income inequality as part of the design…so that prosocial and antisocial behaviour continues to be in balance, and the future of the biodiversity that’s trying to be conserved is not put at risk.

Such precautions will also benefit human communities by helping to lessen the social impact of certain policies and prevent harmful inequalities from arising in the first place. Allowing local communities to have a greater voice in the decisions that are made in their regions, as well as making sure adequate social programs are in place to aid the disadvantaged when such policies are enacted, could be a helpful step forward.

Further research will be necessary for different locations and among different types of protected areas to find out if the results can be generalized. This study could help inform an entirely new line of thinking when it comes to predicting the social and ecological outcomes of establishing a preserve, one that’s hardly been explored before. It opens up this new perspective on competition and collaboration.