Improving marine area governance necessarily requires confronting fundamental underlying problems, such as the prevalence of externalities, open access to marine resources, and the unrestrained increase in demand for resources in the public domain. Whatever the institutional arrangements, responsible bodies must address these problems with effective management tools and approaches. Direct regulation has proven to be cumbersome and often ineffective. The benefits of other approaches, especially approaches that attempt to reconcile private economic incentives with the overall objectives of resource management, have not yet been fully realized.