Coral Triangle Initiative on Coral Reefs, Fisheries and Food Security (CTI-CFF) : case study summary report

The Coral Triangle Initiative for Coral Reefs, Fisheries and Food Security (CTI-CFF) is a multi-lateral treaty partnership between Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Solomon Islands and Timor-Leste, as well as a number of additional NGO, government and donor development partners. The CTI-CFF was initiated in 2007 and launched in 2009 to sustainably manage fisheries, adapt to climate change, improve threatened species status and establish and effectively manage priority seascapes and marine protected areas (MPAs). The CTI-CFF was chosen as a case study because of its multi-lateral cross-border nature, involving six countries with radically different population sizes, cultures and governance regimes. However, the CTI-CFF also demonstrates a rare and equitable partnership approach between governments (of the six Coral Triangle countries), three of the main non-governmental organisations in the region, which are The Nature Conservancy (TNC), World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and Conservation International (CI), and several international and regional donor agencies, including USAID, the Asian Development Bank, and the Australian Government. The CTI-CFF has been specifically designed to recognise the importance of transboundary resources and to facilitate concerted spatial planning across borders, including spatial planning. The CTI-CFF represents a strengthening and aligning of existing marine governance and spatial planning efforts rather than the development of a specific marine spatial plan. This case study also considered finer-scale transboundary initiatives that lie within the CT region and that have been incorporated into the CTI-CFF as priority intervention sites. Two transboundary initiatives were chosen: 1) the Sulu-Sulawesi Marine Ecoregion (SSME), two ecologically similar sea basins covering over 1 million km2 and lying within the marine jurisdictions of Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia; 2) the Turtle Islands Heritage Protected Area (TIHPA); a cluster of nine islands, six of which belong to Philippines and three to Malaysia, designated as the world's first transboundary protected area for turtle nesting sites. At its initiation, the CTI-CFF formed a purely voluntary partnership between the Coral Triangle Member Countries (also referred to as the CT6), consolidated through the adoption of the 10-year CTI-CFF Regional Plan of Action (RPOA) in 2009. The RPOA represents a living, non-binding document that describes the cross-border collaboration mechanism for information sharing, objective-setting and common standards, while retaining each country's independence and nationalism. In 2011, the CT6 agreed to legally formalise the CTI-CFF partnership through the legally binding Secretariat agreement, resulting in a coordinating Regional Secretariat, formalised coordination procedures, and subscription costs for all six countries (proportional to their GDP) to support the financial costs of the Regional Secretariat. The approximate total funding to date is somewhere in the range of