French Polynesia has been a colony of France since 1843. Prior to the 1960s, French Polynesia's national economy was based on meager exports of copra, vanilla, coffee, and phosphate. Local people made their livelihoods through subsistence farming and fishing, in addition to petty marketing of agricultural and other commodities.

After Algeria gained its independence in 1962, France shifted its nuclear test program from the Saharan Desert to French Polynesia, which marked a surge in economic development in French Polynesia, particularly in the Society Islands. An airport and shipping ports were built at Papeete on reclaimed reefs to handle the transfer of people and equipment for the nuclear test sites on the atolls of Moruroa and Fangataufa, as well as a support base on Hao Atoll and the headquarters in Papeete. The construction of this infrastructure opened the gates for tourism to enter the region.

Development projects undertaken by Le Pacte de Progres on Moorea are largely related to export agriculture and tourism. These include subsidised loans for pineapple farmers, the construction of a new 150-room resort hotel, and loans to tour companies for the purchase of new vehicles and boats for increasing numbers of tourists (particularly from two new 700 passenger cruise ships which visit Moorea for two days each every ten days).

Women have largely entered the new economy as cheap and unskilled workers. Because of increasing inflation and a new sales tax, many women have been forced to abandon subsistence and petty market production to work for wages. In agriculture, women are most often employed as pickers, sorters, and processors, frequently as free labor for their husbands or fathers. In the tourism sector, women work mostly as servers, housekeepers, and entertainers.

The MPA designation process has exacerbated existing conficts and tensions among Moorea's fishing community, largely related to a growing scarcity of fish and increased costs of living. Throughout the lengthy process of designing the MPAs, a series of maps showing various potential MPA sites was published in a daily newspaper. These maps served to further politicize the MPAs, and incited physical violence and property damage among fishers. In addition, conflicts arose among and between the state, hotels, and lagoon tour operators over the definitions and spatial parameters of lagoon habitats, ecology, and management.

To create the controversial maps, a database of lagoon information was created by the Ministry of Urbanism which included a base map of the island and its reef crest, and data on a variety of lagoon uses and features. The maps produced by the government seemed "scientific" and "official," making them difficult to refute by stakeholders. Yet many of the data layers were based on inadequate data. For instance, none of the data layers included measurements of lagoon use in terms of temporal or economic value; and no data were available on lagoon substrates or habitats which would have been helpful in siting the MPAs in relation to variations in lagoon ecology and use. The use of these maps in the PGEM decision-making meetings limited the ability of many stakeholders to insert their cognition of the marine environment into the maps or the decision-making process. In addition, stakeholders felt that important uses and meanings of the lagoon - such as the non-economic value and the spiritual meanings associated with certain areas - could not be identified, quantified, or mapped within the confines of a digital database, or on an analog map for that matter. Stakeholders voiced anger and frustration at not having access to, or knowledge of the computer mapping technology used. At the same time, stakeholders were reluctant to provide their own data to the PGEM policy-makers because they did not trust the state to input or analyze their marine knowledge fairly in the GIS.