1. With the drive for greater numbers and areas of MPAs to be put in place to meet national and international targets, challenges have emerged in both the establishment and development of sustainable governance of the networks of sites that are emerging. 2. Using 12 presentations given in a workshop on Improving participation for better governance of MPAs' at the 3(rd) International Marine Protected Areas Congress in October 2013, this paper reviews a range of top-down, bottom-up and collaborative approaches to governance, looking at all phases in the process from design of an MPA network to its implementation, as well as considering individual MPAs. 3. Designation of MPA networks requires significant investment of resources to engage local stakeholders in discussions over potential site location and management measures. 4. Scaling-up from individual MPAs to networks of MPAs will often also require a scaling-up of governance approaches, including top-down approaches. 5. Balancing the need to provide for the participation of local users in each constituent MPA with the need to address a variety of challenges, whilst achieving wider-scale objectives through the inclusion of top-down governance approaches is an important but neglected challenge in discussions concerning MPA networks. 6. These case studies indicate that there are various ways in which this challenge can be addressed in different contexts and point to potential good practice' for other MPAs in similar scenarios.