Marine protected areas (MPAs) were established with the main objective to sustain a healthy ecosystem and protect natural resources. While many MPAs adopted various strategies in the area, most in the Southeast Asian region are restricting the extractive activities but allowing some tourism activities, exploiting their aesthetical values as a trade-off to fisheries benefits. However, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the local livelihood and marine resource utilization have become increasingly important. Although we believe protecting natural ecosystems are important, we also realised that the total restriction strategy in MPAs are not always supported by the local stakeholders and may encourage noncompliance when livelihood is at stake. Besides, it has been shown that tourism in MPAs may also bring some adverse and unintended impacts. This study aims to evaluate and compare the total extractive strategy with some other less stringent strategies including spatial and temporal closures, and various site access fee and bag limit strategies. The study will develop some agent-based models to simulate and compare ranges of management strategies in terms of both biophysical and socio-economic benefits. The biophysical models will be optimized using data of a few MPAs in Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam as case study areas. Stakeholders including fishing communities and tourists will be surveyed in developing site choice models to be integrated into the biophysical models.