Exploring the goals and objectives of policies for marine ranching management: Performance and prospects for China

This paper aims to analyze the goals and objectives of the policies for marine ranching management. Content analysis was used to code the marine ranching management policies. The paper reviews the policies from three areas according to the definitions of marine ranching: proliferation and release, artificial reefs, and marine ranching. Correspondingly, the performances of the results of the investigation of the goals and objectives were analyzed: the high-level goals mostly focused on construction or management, and they were especially focused on construction. The gap between the centralized and local high-level goals was obvious and the goals and objectives were mostly time-bounded and indicated the expected results but not were measurable or assignable. According to the investigation results, this paper summarizes the prospects for the future. To improve the quality and speed of marine ranching development and prevent confusion during implementation, two-way communication between the central and local governments and overall management of central government to close the gap between the goals and objectives, pay more attention to management after construction, assignable and indirect measurable goals and objectives and a management plan should be considered in the future.