by
Edward H. Allison and Benoît Horemans 123
Summary
Poverty alleviation is now high on the agendas of most developing-country fishery management agencies and their partners in donor and multilateral institutions. ‘Sustaining livelihoods’ of the poor in fishing-dependent communities by enabling or enhancing their access to fishing opportunities is prominent in contemporary fisheries development thinking. This appears to be fundamentally incompatible with the current imperative to reduce capacity and to create more effective barriers to entry to fisheries, in order to conserve fully or overexploited fish stocks.
This paper discusses possible means of reconciling the apparently contradictory agendas of pro-poor fisheries development and the imperative to manage fisheries by limiting access. Current conceptualisations of poverty and vulnerability are introduced, and the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach (SLA) is outlined, together with its application to addressing issues of poverty and fisheries management. Insights derived from the application of the SLA are used to critically examine the current consensus view on the relationship between poverty and small-scale fisheries, as encapsulated in the concept of ‘Malthusian overfishing’.
A more nuanced and situation-specific understanding of poverty-fisheries relationships is supported and the different roles that fisheries might play in poverty alleviation efforts are examined. A distinction is made among policy visions that portray fisheries as: (i) an ‘engine of economic growth’ (ii) a means of providing better incomes or reduced vulnerability for ‘traditional fishers’ (iii) a means to supply consumers, particularly poor consumers with elements of a high-quality diet, and; (iv) a means to reduce the vulnerability of the poorest in rural society, including ‘non-traditional’ fishers (a broad safety net function). It is argued that the compatibility of fisheries resource management and poverty alleviation can be reconciled with each of these visions, but that such reconciliation requires greater compromise in some cases than others.
The conclusion is that, providing one understands and can define the main role for fisheries in the economy, one can begin to make policy that recognises the trade-offs between increasing contribution to poverty alleviation and the need to conserve the resource. One reason why fisheries are managed sustainably is that society expects them to deliver on too many incompatible functions.
1. INTRODUCTION
Participants in the management of small-scale fisheries in developing countries - including fisherfolk themselves - apparently face a critical dilemma. Should the alleviation of poverty among people with current or potential access to fish stocks be the overriding concern of fisheries development? Or should we be responding to the apparent crisis in world fisheries by advising management organizations to limit access to fisheries that are thought to be overexploited124 , whether the fisherfolk dependent on them are poor or not? If exploitation rates are not somehow limited, won't resource rents be dissipated so that all fishers will be poor in the future, if they are not already? Depending on how one answers these questions, one can be accused of ‘favouring fish over people’, or ‘supporting the irreversible destruction of the environment’.
One of the key roles of fisheries policy is to set a vision for the future of fisheries and to guide management towards achieving this vision. It is for this reason that we consider different policy visions for reconciling poverty alleviation and fisheries conservation, and we explore how existing and proposed policy is based on understandings of the relationship between poverty and overexploitation - understandings that may be based on worldviews that have received limited empirical and theoretical scrutiny. We add the caveat that a global vision for the future of fisheries and oceans doesn't have to result in a ‘one size fits all’ policy, but should rather be sufficiently broad and flexible to accommodate a diversity of policy at regional, national and local scales. The Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries (FAO, 1995) seems to provide an adequate framework for taking fisheries into the future, despite its lack of rhetorical fire and galvanising metaphor.
Poverty alleviation is now high on the agenda of most developing-country fishery management agencies and that of their partners in donor and multilateral institutions. Sustaining livelihoods of the poor in fishing-dependent communities by enabling or enhancing their access to fishing opportunities is prominent in contemporary fisheries development thinking. Can these worthy objectives, such as poverty alleviation through improved access to fishing opportunities by the poor, possibly be compatible with the current imperative to reduce capacity and to create more effective barriers to entry to fisheries, in order to conserve declining fish stocks?
In order to address this question, we first need to revisit our understanding of the relationship between poverty and fisheries. It is a relationship that has been portrayed in an oversimplified way, with damaging consequences for both people and fish. Even before that, we need to outline what we understand by poverty and we need to explain and defend the new tools we are using to broaden and improve our understanding of poverty among fisherfolk.
The paper thus starts with a brief overview of our current understanding of poverty, followed by an outline of the framework through which we look at poverty and ways to alleviate it - the sustainable livelihoods approach (SLA). We then examine the conventional wisdoms on poverty in fisheries and look at how the SLA has helped us (and others) to challenge them. We make no apologies for seeking to replace popular but unfounded rallying slogans such as ‘there are too many people chasing too few fish’, ‘fishermen are the poorest of the poor’ and ‘fishing is the occupation of last resort’, with more nuanced, complex and case-specific understanding of the relationship between fishing and poverty.
2. UNDERSTANDING POVERTY IN THE FISHERIES CONTEXT: A LIVELIHOODS APPROACH
2.1 Poverty and vulnerability - a brief review of concepts and definitions
Our understanding, measurement and definition of poverty have evolved from a focus on poverty as defined mainly by low consumption and low income, and encompassing a lack of basic needs (access to food, shelter, health and sanitation). Today's more comprehensive definition is exemplified by the one found in the Development Action Committee's (DAC) Guidelines on Poverty Reduction (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 2001):
“Poverty encompasses different dimensions of deprivation that relate to human capabilities including consumption and food security, health, education, rights, voice, security, dignity and decent work.” (OECD (2001, p. 8).
In the1990s the ‘basic needs’ approach of the International Labour Organization (ILO), with its multi-dimensional concept of poverty, was adapted by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) for its Human Development Index (HDI), and provides the indicators for setting the Millennium Development Goals. This model, which is clearly recognised in the OECD DAC definition above, seems to have achieved broad consensus in the international community.
Complementing the quantitative indicators of development used to construct the HDI are more qualitative understandings of poverty, as encapsulated in the ‘voices of the poor’ exercise conducted by the World Bank (Narayan et al., 2000). At national level, most countries now have ‘participatory poverty assessments’ (PPA) to supplement quantitative, survey-based, poverty assessments such as integrated household surveys as a means to monitor progress in implementing poverty reduction policies. PPAs, like the ‘voices of the poor’ exercise, attempt to capture poor peoples’ own experience and definition of poverty. Such definitions recognise the complexity and multidimensional nature of poverty, and give prominence to lack of the assets needed to achieve ‘well-being’, the psychological aspects such as feelings of powerlessness, humiliation and insecurity,125 the absence of basic infrastructure and services and the absence of rights (be they land rights or human rights). Poverty analysis thus focuses on the vulnerability to risk that results from these conditions, rather than on incomes alone.
Vulnerability (of a person or livelihood) is a function of the risks to which people may be exposed, the sensitivity of their particular livelihood system to those risks, and their ability to adapt to, cope with or recover from the impacts of an external ‘shock’ to their livelihood system (e.g. Adger et al., 2004). In the case of fisheries, people may be exposed to physical risks (e.g., waves and high winds, accidents hauling nets), climate-induced risks (rising sea levels, impacts of global warming on fish stock productivity), health risks (bilharzias, malaria), market risks (currency devaluations) and security risks (theft, conflict) among many others. Their sensitivity to fishing-associated risks will be related to their dependency on fisheries, and their adaptive capacity may depend on their ability to adjust to, or avoid risks (e.g. by drawing on assets such as savings or education). The three elements of vulnerability may all be related to other dimensions of poverty. For example: people living in poverty may be more likely to live in an area where they are exposed to health risks from poor sanitary conditions; if their nutritional status is poor, they will be more sensitive to infection than a well-nourished person; and if they lack money for treatment their capacity to cope with and recover from infection will be lower than a rich person, who can pay for medicines. A recent review of the literature on poverty in fishing communities (Macfadayen and Corcoran, 2002) concludes that targeting the vulnerable - those with a high chance that they will fall into poverty - may be as important to poverty alleviation as focusing on those who are currently the poorest in income or material asset terms.
The multi-dimensional nature of poverty in fishing communities is now widely acknowledged. Townsley (1998) for instance points out that “fishing communities are often characterized by overcrowded living conditions and inadequate services, low levels of education and a lack of skills and assets (particularly land)…”, and the FAO emphasizes that fishers generally “live in remote and isolated communities, are poorly organised and politically voiceless and … often highly exposed to accidents and natural disasters” (FAO 2000, point 8). Recent studies have also shown that rates of HIV prevalence and death from AIDS-related illnesses are particularly high in many fishing communities in low-income countries (Allison and Seeley, 2004).
The above discussion points to an important conclusion: poverty in fishery-dependent communities is not necessarily directly - or only - related to the resource or catch levels (Béné 2003). For example, although resource over-exploitation may be a major cause of impoverishment for fishing communities, extreme poverty (in some dimensions) can also be observed in remote fishing camps where fishers catch and trade reasonable volumes of fish but lack access to health and other public services and are politically un-represented.
Poverty and vulnerability are not unique to fishing communities and their distribution reflects the wider issue of deepening rural poverty in many countries, associated with de-agrarianisation and increasing urbanisation (e.g. Cohen, 2003; Tiffen, 2003). Fisherfolk are also found in urban areas (particularly in densely populated S and SE Asia and some West African countries), and although little is known of their socio-economic status, it seems likely they are to be found among the urban poor. Likewise, the important question of gender differences in the dimensions of poverty transcends the small-scale fisheries sector, with an estimated 70 percent of the world's poor being women (United Nations, 1996).
This progress in our understanding of poverty in fisheries has been reflected in recent attempts to assess the different dimensions of poverty in fishing-dependent communities that combine measures of incomes, assets and vulnerability context, often carried out under the organising framework of the ‘Sustainable Livelihoods Approach’.
2.2 The (Sustainable) Livelihoods Approach
Understanding the multiple dimensions of poverty and vulnerability requires a broad, multidisciplinary approach. Frameworks are useful in this context. Systems thinking, as applied with great clarity to fisheries by Charles (2001), provide an overall conceptual structure within which specific systems components can be considered from alternative perspectives. One such perspective is the SLA.126
2.2.1 Origins, principles and definitions
The SLA has its origins in studies concerned with understanding the differential capability of rural families to cope with crises such as droughts, floods, or plant and animal pests and diseases (Chambers & Conway, 1992). The approach also borrows ideas from an ecological literature concerned with the sustainability of ecosystems or agroecological systems. The concepts of resilience and sensitivity as livelihood attributes also originate in this context. Resilience refers to the ability of an ecological or livelihood system to “bounce back” from stress or shocks; while sensitivity refers to the magnitude of a system's response to an external disturbance. It follows from these ideas that the most robust livelihood system is one displaying high resilience and low sensitivity; while the most vulnerable displays low resilience and high sensitivity.
The concept of ‘a livelihood’ seeks to bring together the critical factors that affect the vulnerability or strength of individual or family survival strategies:
“A livelihood comprises the assets (natural, physical, human, financial and social capital), the activities, and the access to these (mediated by institutions and social relations) that together determine the living gained by the individual or household.” (Ellis, 2000; p.10).
The livelihoods approach is typically set out in the form of a set of guiding principles and an explanatory framework.
There is no prescribed livelihoods ‘method’, although the core principles that underlie sustainable livelihood (SL) thinking can be summarised, in a fisheries context, as:
The livelihoods framework brings together assets and activities, as well as demonstrating the interactions between them. There are many different diagrammatic representations of this framework, all of which seem to confuse rather than illuminate! The version used by the UK Department for International Development is given in Figure 1.
The reference social scope of this framework is typically considered to be the household. In many developing countries, the extended household includes members who are away from home (including urban and international migrants) but send remittances back to the resident homestead.
A starting point for the framework are the capital assets owned, controlled, claimed, or by some other means accessed by the household. The livelihoods framework recognises five main asset categories, comprising:
Access to both assets and activities is enabled or hindered by the policy and institutional context (or transforming structures and processes) of livelihoods, including social relations, institutions and organizations. For example, it may only be possible to access fishing as a livelihood source if you have a licence, or are a member of a producer organization, or come from a local fishing family. The licence is an example of a formal institution, enshrined in national law or local by-laws, and enforced through formal organizations such as fishery management organizations of government. The other examples are of informal institutions that use social pressures to ensure compliance. Access and rights regimes and how they work - or don't - are of course at the heart of fisheries management. The livelihoods approach helps to ensure that any fisheries or coastal policy and management intervention gives full consideration to the range of resources that people may be able to draw on and the factors that may help some in doing so, while hindering others.
Livelihood sustainability is also affected by external factors, sometimes referred to as the vulnerability context , comprising seasonality of livelihood activities, and trends and shocks that are outside the control of the household. Trends might include decreasing catch rates, increasing prices for fish, and a number of non-fishing related trends that nevertheless impact on fishing households, such as degradation of critical coastal habitats by pollution or increased restrictions imposed by planning authorities on coastal building and infrastructure development. Examples of shocks are storm events that damage shore facilities, toxic algal blooms or the Asian financial crisis of 1997. At a household level, methods used by the illness or death of a family member or the theft of a fishing net is an obvious shock. The vulnerability context should not be considered only in terms of negative factors. External trends and events can have positive impacts: increasing coastal tourism can improve local markets for fish, or a new road can improve market and service access and generate more economic activity, although those best placed to benefit most from these changes will tend to be the non-poor.
Understanding how people succeed or fail in sustaining their livelihoods in the face of shocks, trends and seasonality can help to design policies and interventions to assist peoples' existing coping and adaptive strategies. These interventions may include, at various levels, social service provision, insurance and compensation payments and promotion of diversification127 - all issues seldom considered by fisheries management and policy analysts.
Capital assets permit livelihood strategies to be constructed by individuals or households. These may be composed of a portfolio of activities, only some of which may be related to fishing. Migration is an important component of many fisherfolks' livelihood strategies (both men in the catching sector, and women in the post-harvest sector). Strategies can also relate to people's consumption choices (e.g. ‘doing without’ or the sale of assets).
Finally, this framework points to outcomes of livelihood strategies. A sustainable livelihood is one in which people are able to maintain or improve their standard of living (related to satisfaction, ‘well-being’ and income), reduce their vulnerability to external shocks and trends, and ensure their activities are compatible with maintaining the natural resource base (in this case the fish stocks). A sustainable livelihood is therefore likely to be one in which people are able to build their capital assets - e.g. through savings and access to credit, access to education and training, or investment in their own boat and house. They should also be able to at least maintain the natural capital that they share with other households - the fish stocks and the quality of the aquatic environment. Quality of life is also enhanced if ‘social capital’ is maintained or enhanced. Fishing livelihoods are sustained partly though fishing community solidarity but links to the wider community are also important. Fisherfolks' political and social marginalisation in many countries often means they currently have little support outside the sector.128
Figure 1. The rural livelihoods framework as a means to understand natural resource management systems (Source: UK Department for International Development)
Policies, institutions and organizations can help improve livelihood outcomes by supporting the design of appropriate access regimes and by providing an ‘enabling environment’ comprising good, responsive public services to fishing communities.
The SLA is now widely used by development agencies and NGOs to achieve a better understanding of the scope for development intervention in support of natural resource management systems (Ashley and Carney, 1999). The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, the UNDP, many major international non-government organizations (INGOs) (e.g. CARE, OXFAM, ITDG) and most of the European bilateral agencies have recently put these principles into their development practice and recognise that, taken together, they represent a new way of working. A fundamental precept of the approach is that it seeks “to identify what [people] have rather than what they do not have” and “[to] strengthen people's own inventive solutions, rather than substitute for, block or undermine them” (Moser, 1998; p. 1). This alone serves to distinguish it from many past fishery development approaches!
2.2.2 Using the SLA in practice
The livelihoods approach is utilised in different ways, according to the goal of the study or programme. In development practice, it is often used as a ‘process’ tool to enable participants in development programmes who come from different sectors (e.g. local government, business development, health, transport, natural resources) to work together to identify key constraints and opportunities for development intervention (Ashley and Carney, 1999). The SLA is also widely used as a project and programme design framework. Management programmes or development projects can be re-focused on sustaining livelihoods by appropriate definition of their aims and objectives, the means of verifying achievement of these objectives and indicators for monitoring progress. Standard project cycle management procedures are an appropriate way of incorporating SL thinking into project design and implementation.
Many examples of the SL approach in practice can be found on the ‘Livelihoods Connect’ website (http://www.livelihoods.org), sponsored by the UK Department for International Development. In fisheries, the 25 - country Sustainable Fisheries Livelihoods Programme (www.sflp.org) is pioneering the cross-scale application of the concept in West Africa's fisheries sector (Horemans, 2004).
The concepts and methods of livelihoods analysis have recently been applied to understanding the role that fisheries play in the rural economy in coastal, lakeshore and floodplain areas in developing countries (e.g. Allison and Ellis, 2001, Béné et al., 2003, Béné and Neiland, 2004, Nettleton and Baran, 2003, Whittingham et al., 2003, van Oostenbrugge et al, 2004, Pittaluga et al, 2004, Allison, 2005). This work is helping to challenge accepted wisdoms about small-scale fisheries and generalisation about their status in an ‘occupation of last resort’ and refuge for ‘the poorest of the poor’.129 We report some insights from this work in a later section of this paper.
The livelihoods framework also forms the basis for recent policy-relevant empirical research that seeks to capture the cross-sectoral nature of rural people's income-generating and subsistence activities and identify how their pursuit of improved livelihoods is helped or hindered by change in central government policy and global policy shifts such as market liberalisation and political and fiscal decentralisation (e.g. Ellis and Freeman, 2005). Livelihoods research combines qualitative and quantitative methods drawn from a range of disciplines. Once again, there is no standard ‘method’, but there is an emerging consensus that at the core of the methods are quantitative household income and asset and expenditure surveys, as used in micro-economics research. These are combined with a range of qualitative methods of enquiry designed to analyse peoples' concerns and perceptions of change (vulnerability context) and their local institutional context (Pittaluga et al., 2004; LADDER project http://www.uea.ac.uk/odg/ladder). The qualitative tools are largely drawn from the range of participatory methods developed in the context of community development programme (e.g. Mikkelsen, 1995). Added to these are the methods used by geographers, institutional analysts and political scientists to map out policy linkages from local to international level (e.g. Pasteur, 2001).
2.3. Limitations of livelihoods approaches
Lest we come across as SLA evangelists, we briefly examine some potential difficulties and shortcomings.
The livelihoods approach may imply the collation of a daunting quantity of information but in fact it is best thought of as a checklist of issues and concerns that need to be thought about when designing interventions for policy. Often, much of the information is already available but has not been appropriately synthesised. In many cases, management and policy change can be based on existing understanding of livelihood issues, synthesised from key informants and from representatives of different stakeholder groups, rather than investment in detailed research to quantify all the boxes and linkages.
Many people erroneously see the livelihoods framework as a mathematical model for which it is necessary to quantify stocks (boxes) and flows (arrows). It is usually neither possible nor useful to quantify the value of all asset categories in the ‘asset pentagon’. Important social concepts such as ‘agency’ (the ability of an individual to influence others, or their own circumstances) are not always better understood by reducing them to quantitative indicators. In the asset pentagon, the categories of capital (physical, natural, social etc) are most useful as a conceptual tool - to remind us that people use not only money, boats and fish to support their livelihood, but may also draw on inputs from their family labour, their educational and professional skills, their political influence, their physical strength, the social services provided by the state, the infrastructure funded by taxpayers and a host of other ‘assets’ that policy and management intervention can help to support, redistribute or undermine.
It is possible to use indicators of different elements of the asset base of households, where such indicators are useful for quantitative comparison (e.g. to identify different groups of people within a fishery or make comparative assessments over time). An example of indicators that can be relatively easily measured are given in Figure 2, which shows how certain assets can be used to differentiate the poorest, middle and highest income terciles among households in a Malawian fishing village. In that case, the poor are clearly differentiated by their lack of ownership of livestock and fishing-related assets, suggesting that large family size and low education are not the primary correlates or determinants of poverty in these communities, as is often suggested.
| Six asset categories have been measured. Household size (number of people, with adults of working age given greater weighting) is an indicator of ‘human capital’ in the form of labour resources that the household can draw on. Education, measured in years of school attendance by adult members of the household, is also part of the household human capital. Land area owned, and livestock owned (in cattle equivalent units) are measures of natural capital, while the monetary value of tools (agricultural implements and other productive assets such as bicycles for transportation) and boats and fishing gear are examples of physical capital at the household level. |
| The sample was divided into income terciles using household income survey data and the average asset value or indicator calculated for each tercile. All asset indicators are standardised as a proportion of the highest value. In this case, the wealthiest group (income tercile III) are distinguished from the other two groups mainly by the greater value of livestock and fishing-related assets that they own. Household size, educational level and land-area owned are not clearly related to livelihood outcome in terms of higher household incomes. The middle income group tend to be more engaged in farming and trading than the wealthiest group, who are more involved in fishing. Qualitative research, including life histories and institutional analysis, is then used to understand the factors that led to some households being able to successfully access fishing opportunities and others not (e.g. through the interplay between social capital and local level political and social institutions). |
Figure 2. Example of an asset polygon, for households engaged in fishing on the shores of Lake Chilwa, Malawi
(Allison and Mvula, 2002)
In addition to remarking on an unhealthy preoccupation with the asset pentagon, Brocklesby and Fisher (2003) summarised a number of other criticisms of the livelihoods approach, particularly in its widely-applied DFID form. These criticisms included:
SLA-fatigue has set in among some development agencies, and DFID - probably its most fervent champion - has decided that, like gender, the SLA has been effectively ‘mainstreamed’ and consequently disbanded the Livelihoods Support Group, stopped central funding for training and awareness on SLA (although this continues through DFID country-level programmes) and phased out support for the website. All this took place just around the time those outside the development industry were beginning to take an interest in it.
Will SLA prove to be been a passing fashion? Our own view is that the underlying set of principles are likely to survive, but there will be less emphasis on the dogmatic adherence to the asset pentagon and all the other boxes and arrows. The deficiencies outlined above can be - and are - addressed in most contemporary livelihoods-focused development programmes. Livelihoods approaches are evolving and merging with rights-based approaches and community-development, most notably in the way that community-based or co-management systems are being analysed, designed and supported by development programmes. At the very least,
“adopting a livelihoods approach has involved a critical shift from saying ‘how do we plan for forests, agriculture or fisheries, etc.’ to saying ‘how do we plan for people's livelihoods (in a participatory manner)’ ” (Brocklesby and Fisher, 2003, p. 195).
This has led to improved dialogue between fisheries managers and policy makers and those concerned with other areas of rural development in areas such as water resources, health and education ministries. This, in turn, helps raise the profile of fishing in poverty reduction policies at local and national level, which may translate into more political support for sustainable fisheries.
3. CONTESTED UNDERSTANDINGS OF THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN POVERTY AND FISHERIES
There has long existed in the fisheries literature a dominant narrative describing ‘artisanal’ fisherfolk as landless, unskilled, uneducated poor people, locked into fishing through lack of alternative opportunities. It has been assumed that fisheries are easy to get into but difficult to get out of leading to overcapitalisation and dissipation of resource rents as the growing population of poor fisherfolk scramble to catch the last fish. Pauly (1997) describes this process as ‘Malthusian Overfishing’, perhaps an unfortunate label (or deliberately provocative), given the strong feelings evoked by neo-Malthusian arguments linking ‘overpopulation’ with poverty and environmental degradation - arguments that have in any case largely been discredited (reviewed in Allison, 2002).
This ‘poorest of the poor’ narrative has been difficult to challenge, particularly in the face of undeniable resource declines, because there has been little information on the relationship between fisheries and poverty (Béné, 2003). In Tanzania's recent national Household Budget Survey, for example, agriculture, livestock and fisheries are not disaggregated and in surveys of poverty in Malawi, such as the Integrated Household Survey of 1997 and 1998 households involved in fishing and related activities were not sampled, so that national-level generalisations about poverty and livelihoods are not necessarily applicable to understanding the particular circumstances of fisherfolk. However, recent empirical work on fishing livelihoods has been undertaken by several researchers in the last few years (see references in section 2.2.2 of this paper) and has allowed these assumptions to be tested, while Béné (2003) has conducted a detailed conceptual review of the causative and correlative elements of the relationship between poverty and fisheries.
The elements of the ‘Malthusian’ narrative are considered below, one by one.
3.1 Population growth is leading to an increase in the number of fishers
Rural populations are shrinking or stabilising in many countries, as urbanisation gathers pace (Cohen, 2003; Tiffen, 2003) and demographic transitions occur (from high to low birth rate) in fast-growing economies such as those in SE Asia. One of the very few studies of fisheries and population (Tietze et al., 2000) has shown the number of fisherfolk in several major fishing nations is similarly decreasing (Malaysia), stabilising (Tanzania, Philippines), or the rate of increase is slowing (Bangladesh). As Malthus posited exponential population growth, we can reject the Malthusian over-fishing narrative on this basis alone. Population growth is undeniably a problem for fisheries, but most acutely so because it leads to increased market demand.
3.2 Fisheries are easy to get into
We have seldom encountered true ‘open access’ (where anyone can fish whenever, wherever they want with no institutional constraints). In even the apparently unregulated fisheries, some negotiation with existing fishers or de facto authorities is often required. In Africa, permission to fish may be seldom refused, but it is usually granted upon some condition. These de facto arrangements (informal taxes, letters of recommendation from traditional authorities etc) may not constitute sufficient barriers to entry to have a significant effort-limitation effect in many cases, but they provide evidence for the existence of remnant or evolving property rights regimes. The existence of conflict is an indicator of a struggle to assert or defend rights of access.
For any fishery that requires a boat, the notion that the poor face no barrier to entry is clearly false. Studies in Eastern and Southern Africa (Allison and Mvula, 2002; Allison, 2003; 2004) indicate that current boat owners typically worked 8–10 as crew labourers to make enough money to buy a boat. Often this was achieved in stages, with a crew member first owning a hurricane lamp (for night fishing), then a part-share in a net, until eventually they were able to buy a boat. In many cases, alternative avenues of income-generation were required to accumulate sufficient capital to enter the fishery. Documenting peoples' life-histories (a neglected and extremely useful tool for analysing fishery dynamics) reveals, for example, that Malawian boat owners had accumulated capital through a variety of geographically dispersed activities that included working in the mines in South Africa, as security guards in Tanzania, and, in one case, as a ‘cook for a white man in Zambia’.
There are obviously very poor people involved in fishing, either as share-earning crew labour or in various low-margin associated activities (e.g. carrying fish from the boat to the market, cleaning the landing site, repairing nets etc), but the key point is that these jobs don't add fishing capacity and the number of available positions for crew labour is not infinite, but is set by the number of boats in the fishery. The number of boats depends on the number of people with sufficient capital to invest in a boat. The number of sufficiently wealthy people who choose to invest in a boat will, in turn, be a function of the anticipated financial returns for doing so, relative to alternative forms of capital investment130 , such as buying more cows or more land, building a restaurant, bar or guest house or setting up a bicycle-repair workshop. In a declining and unprofitable fishery, it is unlikely that crew members will progress to boat ownership, so this too, limits future entry into the sector.
The only fisheries likely to consist uniquely of ‘the poorest of the poor’ are open-access, shore-based fisheries that can be equated with gleaning and scavenging activities (e.g. the fisheries for shrimp larvae in Bangladesh). All other fisheries will support the livelihoods of a large variety of people of varying wealth and levels of dependency on fishing. The wealth and occupational structure of those involved in fishing needs to be broadly understood before any management and development intervention is proposed, particularly if such intervention aims to target the poor as its beneficiaries.
3.3 Fisheries are hard to get out of
The notion of people being locked into fishing through their sunk capital pervades the fisheries economics literature. But there is a lot of evidence to suggest that, in SSF, in the absence of external interference in the form of grants, technical assistance, subsidised credit etc., capital investment and capacity utilisation are limited to what can generate a viable financial return from the fishery, and people commonly leave the fishery, permanently or temporarily, in response to other opportunities (e.g. Panayoutou, 1982). An artisanal fishery that might have been judged technologically primitive or inefficient might simply reflect carefully calculated and limited levels of capital investment by individuals, based on past experience of the need to adjust to fluctuating returns (Allison and Ellis, 2001). In this context, keeping capacity idle in bad years is not too costly, and fishing effort and capacity may be only loosely related (making frame surveys unreliable as a measure of effort). Past development projects' attempts to increase the level of capital investment in fisheries to increase efficiencies and fishing incomes in the artisanal sector has probably been responsible for increasing overcapacity and fisheries dependence.
3.4 Fishers are occupationally immobile and lack transferable skills
Fisherfolk not only exhibit occupational diversity at any given moment (the majority of the worlds' small-scale fishers have multiple occupations); entry into and out of the fisheries sector is also highly dynamic, as has been suggested above. Migration is a key element of fishing livelihoods in many important small-scale fisheries (e.g. Allison and Ellis, 2001; Jul-Larsen et al., 2003) and can be seen either as a problem for sustainability, or a means by which excess capacity voluntarily exits an economically overexploited fishery, allowing it to recover. Unregulated migration is obviously a problem for sustainability, but, faced with mobile and fluctuating coastal fish stocks or floodplains and lakes whose geographical extent varies seasonally and from year to year, it is obviously necessary for some fisherfolk to retain some degree of spatial mobility. Migration is associated with acquisition of new skills, life-experiences and opportunities and can thus be seen as contributing positively to occupational mobility.
The diversified livelihoods of many fisherfolk are indicators that they are able to engage in different activities when these are available, but not all diversification is positive and accumulative. The unskilled may find themselves in ‘poverty traps’ where they diversify into a range of marginal activities in order to piece together a livelihood (Ellis, 2000). “Poor endowments of productive, non-labour assets such as land, livestock [or fishing boats] commonly force poorer households to hire themselves out to work others' fields, herd others' animals [or fish on others' boats] for low wages” (Barrett et al., 2001, p. 370 - boats added by us).
If fisherfolk are ‘trapped’ in fishing, it is often external forces, rather than fisherfolks' human capital limitations, that conspire to increase fishery dependence and therefore the risk of overexploitation. In the case of settled farmer-fishers in Africa's inland waters, declining returns from agriculture and livestock-keeping, due to various combinations of unfavourable macro-economic adjustment policies, theft due to declining internal security, and withdrawal of government extension services under market liberalisation, is pushing more people into full-time fishing (Allison and Mvula, 2002; Freeman et al, 2004). Increased dependency on fishing is not desirable in the long-run, even if it may be profitable in the short run. The livestock-farming-fishing ‘tri-economy’ has been a common livelihood strategy in lakeshore areas throughout Africa and has proved resilient to extensive biophysical and economic changes (e.g. Geheb and Binns, 1997; Neiland et al., 2000; Sarch and Birkett, 2000), and could remain viable if flaws in the current institutional context are addressed by improved local-level governance. The removal of barriers to mobility and active support for livelihood diversification are relevant overall policy directions in this context.
In summary, occupational and geographical mobility are pervasive features of small-scale fishing, challenging the view that fisherfolk are ‘locked into’ fishing. And, as Hannesson (2002) has pointed out “There is ample reason not to underestimate the entrepreneurship and employability of fishermen who one might be tempted to write off as human capital with stranded skills. In the exercise of their trade, fishermen often show themselves both inventive and adaptable. Those skills are quite likely to be portable to other settings”.
3.5 Fishermen are ‘the poorest of the poor’
Empirical work on incomes and occupational choices in coastal and riparian communities suggests that fisherfolk, particularly those who own fishing gear and control rights of access to resources, are among the wealthier members of these communities (Pollnac et al., 2001; Allison and Mvula, 2002; Allison, 2003; 2005; Béné and Neiland, 2004; Freeman et al 2004), with migrant fisherfolk - the most fishery dependent of all - often having better (or larger, more destructive) fishing gear than residents and thereby achieve greater incomes from fishing than settled farmer-fishers achieve from combining farming, agricultural wage labour, livestock keeping and fishing. Among settled farmer-fishers, it is those with access to skilled jobs, command over greater land and livestock assets and access to markets, services and infrastructure that are wealthier, in income and material asset terms (Ellis and Freeman, 2005). Fishermen are also often wealthier than women in fishing-related activities, who may be confined to low-margin economic activities (Dolan, 2002). Disagreggating the undifferentiated ‘fisherfolk’ is clearly necessary before sweeping statements on relative poverty status can be made.
We would not wish to replace one generalition with another by suggesting that small-scale fishers are the ‘richest of the poor’. Levels of poverty (relative to a national poverty line) are higher in fisherfolk around the Visayas, Philippines, than in non-fishing communities (Munoz, J.C., cited in Schmidt, 2004, this workshop), and fishers (particularly women and youth) are found disproportionately among the extreme poor in Bangladesh (J.Seeley, ‘Livelihoods of the Extreme Poor’ study, pers. comm.). Added to this, as has already been mentioned, higher incomes do not necessarily make fisherfolk rich or invulnerable.
Although fisherfolk are not always among the ‘poorest of the poor’ in terms of income, other dimensions of poverty and vulnerability must be considered. Like other rural people, fisherfolk tend to be poorly served by access to basic needs such as education and health service provision, financial services and practical and technical support provided by extension or small business advisory services. Several features of fisheries also make fishing households vulnerable. Fishing is one of the riskiest of occupations (ILO, 2000); it is hard manual labour and requires good physical health. Prevalence of HIV/AIDS are high in many fishing communities in low-income countries (Allison and Seeley, 2004). Increasing levels of theft are widely reported requiring monitoring of nets at night. As temporary residents or recent migrants, fisherfolk are often marginalized from local decision-making structures; and fisherfolk are prey to rent-seeking officials - often, the first person a fisherman sees on returning from a night's fishing is the local tax revenue collector.
3.6 Fisheries are the ‘occupation of last resort’
Despite the risks and vulnerability associated with fisheries-based livelihoods, fishing remains an occupation of choice for many in Africa, as it does in South-East Asia (Pollnac et al., 2001), where fishermen rated their job satisfaction very highly. The lifestyle attractions of fishing are often overlooked. To young men, the chance to earn cash income outside the social strictures of their home village and enjoy the masculine camaraderie of a migrant fishing fleet may be a significant ‘pull’ factor, for which it is worth putting up with danger and drudgery. For women in search of economically independent lives, fishing ports and landing centres may offer opportunities unavailable in rural areas with less monetized economies (Appleton, 2000). Fishing may be seen as providing alternatives to other, similar options, such as migration to urban centres, or even into professions such as small-scale gold mining, which offers similar rewards, but with even higher risks and lower probabilities of success (Graz, 2001)131
That risk and marginalization should be seen as a price worth paying the chance to earn a livelihood is a sad reflection on the difficult choices individuals in poor countries have to make in order to seek better lives, but it should not condemn fisherfolk to being seen as entirely helpless victims at the bottom of the social heap. Among the fisherfolk are many enterprising people who make significant positive contributions to regional and national food systems and economies. A livelihoods perspective suggests that we identify these strengths and assist fisherfolk to build on them, rather than trying to offer new, externally-conceived solutions.
3.7 Conclusion - rejecting generalisations
To conclude, we reject the common generalisations that make up the ‘Malthusian overfishing’ narrative described in sections 3.1–3.6 above. Fisheries are not always the occupation of last resort but sometimes they are. Fisherfolk are not always the poorest of the poor but they can be. Small-scale fisheries play different roles in different locations, and fisheries can therefore contribute to the prevention and/or reduction of poverty in several possible ways. The trade-offs between conservation and development need to take these differences into account. A ‘one size fits all’ policy is unlikely to be helpful in supporting efforts to move towards sustainability. It is more useful to consider some of the main potential functions of fisheries in the wider economy, drawing on case studies from empirical study, to examine how short-term poverty alleviation goals and long-term sustainable fisheries can be reconciled. This is addressed in the next section.
4. WHAT ROLE DO FISHERIES PLAY IN THE RURAL ECONOMIES OF LOW-INCOME COUNTRIES?
Our point of departure is that it is desirable to sustain fisheries for the societal benefits they confer and for the present and future value of the resources, but that current national and sub-national fishery policies have avoided the difficult choices that need to be made regarding the role that fisheries could play in contributing to poverty alleviation. We set out four different roles that fisheries have played at various times and places in small-scale fisheries, and we look at how policy goals align (or don't) with these roles.
4.1. Increasing fisherfolks' incomes
The conventional development wisdom of the 1950s to the 1970s was that the cause of persistent poverty among small-scale fisherfolk lay in the limited productivity of small boats and ‘artisanal’ fishing gear, a problem curable though provision of more effective technologies (Bailey et al., 1986). Sometimes, efforts to convert what were seen as ‘subsistence fisheries’ into ‘commercial’ fisheries were attempted by scaling up and centralising catching and landing facilities. Fisheries development projects of this era are not generally judged to have been successful (Cycon, 1986) and a legacy of abandoned state-owned ice plants, disused central markets and rusting trawlers can be seen scattered throughout the tropics. Since structural adjustment programmes were instigated, state involvement in the production side of fisheries has gradually been withdrawn. Throughout the period of donor and state support for scaling up or industrialisation of fisheries, the so-called subsistence or artisanal sector continued to expand with limited development assistance, sometimes to out-compete the industrial vessels fishing the same stocks (e.g. Horemans, 1992).
It is fairly obvious that, faced with resource productivity constraints, increasing catching efficiency to increase incomes will result in a decline in the number of fisherfolk that can be supported by a fishery. This trade-off may be acceptable, if it is able to be implemented. However, this has seldom been the case. Aiming to improve fishing-based livelihoods by improving fishing incomes, in the context of widespread rural poverty and ineffective barriers to entry, will quickly result in dissipation of any short-term gains as new entrants arrive to take up opportunities that would otherwise not be available or attractive. In any case, providing technology as a means of entry tends to favour the better off (e.g. those who already have boats) and may have no or negative impacts on the poor.
Although one of us has already been accused of wishing to keep artisanal fisherfolk ‘naked, poor and paddling’, we contend that subsidised credit for the purchase of outboards and improved fishing gear are likely to exacerbate poverty in fishing communities. Production-orientated subsidies as a form of fisheries development aid are likely to be as damaging in small-scale fisheries as they have proved in industrial fisheries.
4.2 Supplying poor consumers with affordable elements of a high-quality diet
There are more consumers than fishers, and it is therefore not surprising that government fishery agencies may see the service of consumer interests as being more important than those of fisherfolk's interests. Colonial fisheries policies in much of southern and eastern Africa emphasised maximising domestic fish supply. In Malawi, for example, fisheries were seen as important in supplying nutritious food at low cost to plantation labour forces (Allison et al., 2002). Post-independence policies retained this focus on production. To make the maximum quantity of fish available at minimum price, development agencies have sometimes grant-aided fishing vessels and processing plants (to be run by the state) so that fish could be supplied at controlled prices. Price subsidies to consumers in the form of price controls (no longer a real option under liberalisation) have negative effects on fisherfolks' incomes.
Supplying poor consumers with low-cost fish usually means focusing catches on small, high productivity fish species that can be caught in large quantities. In a multispecies fishery, such as those found in most large tropical lakes and the demersal zones of shelf-seas, this is likely to deplete both the economic value and ecological resilience of the stocks.
4.3 Small-scale fisheries as an ‘engine of economic growth’
In order to act as a stimulus to growth and poverty reduction, a sector must create significant spin-off effects through inter-sectoral linkages. Studies in four Eastern and Southern African countries (Allison, 2005) and in several West African fisheries (papers in Béné and Neiland, 2004) suggest that the fisheries sector can indeed play these roles, particularly in areas otherwise remote from the cash economy. Income from fishing enables investment in other rural enterprises or in building household assets and therefore security against poverty. This may include investing in livestock, land and agricultural inputs and education for children, or spending on healthcare. Income generated from fisheries is also spent on consumption of a range of goods and services that support markets in some of the poorest areas of rural Africa.
However, in situations where fishing effort exceeds what could be estimated as the long-run maximum economic yield, growth in the sector cannot be promoted without diminishing the benefits that are derived from the resources. Thus, policymakers have the difficult task of balancing the contribution to the rural and national economy from fisheries against concerns for the sustainability of the fish stocks that generate those benefits. State-enforced licensing and technical regulations have been the primary instrument of fisheries regulation in the past and, although the management targets remain similar, the approach has now shifted towards involving fisherfolk in the management of their own resources through community-based or government-community ‘co-management’ partnerships (Wilson et al., 2003).
There are several ways in which rents are captured from fisheries to provide potential development benefits. Central government budgets may benefit from the generation of export revenues (e.g. from Nile Perch in East Africa, marine fisheries in West Africa), local governments see fisheries as a key source of tax revenues. Local markets benefit from fishermen trying to convert their cash into consumables or other forms of capital before the government and other revenue-seeking agents get their hands on it. Weaknesses in the governance environment are the main constraints to realising the development benefits from fisheries-generated income.
4.4 Access to fisheries as a safety net for the poorest and most vulnerable
In countries where many people live in poverty, where economic diversity is very limited, where fish consumption is high, where the economy is not growing fast enough to absorb significant new labour, where property rights are weak or absent and where fisheries are accessible with very low technological input, the fisheries sector may indeed become the refuge for the poorest. This is likely to be the case for some fisheries in countries like Cambodia and Bangladesh, with their accessible floodplain and coastal fisheries, dense populations, high rates of poverty, a tradition of fishing, high rates of fish consumption, few accessible livelihood opportunities for the landless and non-literate, relatively low rates of economic growth and urbanisation and limited or poor regulation of access to resources.
There is a consensus that in such situations, fisheries are very unlikely to be environmentally sustainable, and that they will generate few economic benefits, besides the social benefit of sustaining people who would otherwise have no alternatives. In these contexts, some form of limitation of access that, as much as possible, favours access by the poor, is required.
In other contexts, where national dependence on fisheries is relatively low, fisheries are sporadic and environmentally-driven and the economy is prone to shocks, keeping fisheries as (relatively) open access resources to exploit in times of need would appear to be a sensible policy option. Allison and Sarch (2000); Allison and Mvula, (2002) and Jul-Larsen et al., (2003) have argued that this applies to many of the shallow lakes and wetlands of Africa.
4.5 Hard choices in fisheries development
The potentially conflicting roles that fisheries play in the rural economy makes it important for governments to establish clear policy directions at either national or sub-national level, depending on the nature and variety of a country's fisheries. An individual fishery cannot be managed simultaneously to maximise the supply of cheap fish for domestic consumption, maximise export earnings of high-value fish, provide employment and income-generation to the maximum number of fisherfolk and act as a safety net for all the poor in a region. Neither can interacting fisheries in the same area be optimised to provide all these functions.
Fisheries development involves hard choices between incompatible objectives. At present, many national fisheries policies in developing countries include the goals of increasing the supply of fish to domestic markets and promoting the export of fisheries products, increasing the level of fisherfolks' incomes and providing new employment opportunities in fisheries. These are all individually valid goals, but are mutually incompatible. This can be illustrated by considering the example of policy objectives to increase production, increase domestic consumption of fish by the poor and increase fisherfolk's incomes (Bailey and Jentoft, 1990: 339).
The trade-offs between main policy options for fisheries and the main dimensions of sustainability in a fishery system are summarised in Table 1 and explored in the subsequent bullet points.
Each fishery policy goal is considered below.
Improve fishing incomes. An attempt to improve fishing incomes independently of other sectors could promote environmental sustainability and some local growth if strong, exclusionary property rights can be allocated and maintained to provide stewardship incentives. This would be socially inequitable and may lead to conflict, unless other non-fishing opportunities providing similar returns can be created as well, for non-fishers and those excluded. If, however, property rights cannot be allocated and defended, resource rents will be quickly dissipated and the resource sustainability threatened. This has been the common experience of these types of intervention to date.
Food for low-income consumers. Maximising low-cost food supply tends to be associated with catching large volumes of small fish (the poor cannot afford to buy large fish, asset-poor traders cannot afford to purchase and transport them etc). In multispecies fisheries, this promotes the ‘fishing down’ of larger species, so is only tenable for small-pelagic stocks. This objective is also sometimes associated with neglect of the interests of the fisherfolk in favour of those of the consumers. There will be wider social and economic benefits to ensuring poor consumers have access to high-quality food at affordable prices.
Engine of growth. Where fisheries are managed to maximise their contribution to the rural economy, there may be incentives to maintain stocks of high-value species (in the absence of good management and/or secure rights, these will be depleted), the economy and wider society benefits from a combination of multipliers at local level and fishing communities. However, the cost and availability of fish to poor consumers may decrease.
Safety net. In managing for a safety net function, there is a high risk of stock depletion as, by definition, no access constraint is placed upon any one who needs to access fish. Excluding the better off in favour of the poor is either not possible (as the poor can't get to a fishery without using the capital assets owned by the rich) or is difficult to do because it challenges existing power structures. The economic benefits by allowing fisheries to fulfil this function (e.g. in the form of social problems foregone, such as crimes not committed, emergency food aid not needed etc) have to be balanced against the resource rents foregone and risks of resource collapse.
| Dimensions of sustainability | ||||
| Fisheries policy goals | Environmental Sustainability (national, local) | Economic Growth (national, district) | Social (national, district) | Institutional (community, local) |
| Improve fishing incomes | - - / ++ | - - / ++ | - - | - - |
| Food for low-income consumers | - | 0/+ | ++ | - - |
| Engine of growth | ++/-- | ++ | + | + |
| Safety net | -- | - | ++ | -- |
Table 1. Speculative matrix of compatibility between fishery policy goals and sustainability dimensions.
--/++ = strong negative/positive impact
-/+ = weak impact
(See text for explanation)
5. IMPLEMENTING SUSTAINABLE PRO-POOR FISHERIES GOVERNANCE
“Success in creating a more just world is measured not by the effectiveness with which a policy idea is sold or the passing of legislation or regulations which pertain to it, but in the effects on peoples’ lives”. (Li, 2002, p. 266).
Developing, promoting and selling policies to solve the sustainability dilemma has been a growing industry. Legislative reform has followed policy reform and policy reform has led to money being put into new forms of management and development intervention. As Li (above) reminds us, however, success in selling our new policy ideas is only the first step. Making policy and management work remains a major challenge. This section briefly reviews recent suggestions made at the expert consultation. These will be detailed elsewhere (Béné et al., 2005) and included in a set of technical guidelines on poverty and small-scale-fisheries (FAO, 2005), intended to assist states in the implementation of the 1995 FAO Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries (CCRF).
5.1 The role of international instruments
Although one of the objectives of the CCRF (para f) Article 2) is to: “Promote the contribution of fisheries to food security and food quality, giving priority to the nutritional needs of local communities”, the Code's objectives do not specifically refer to poverty alleviation, or to the role that small-scale fisheries can play towards alleviating poverty and ensuring food security. Indeed, the focus of the Code is more strongly placed on the need to manage industrial fisheries. This is currently being addressed, and technical guidelines for implementation of pro-poor fisheries policies are being developed by FAO.
Non-fishery international policies and instruments, such as agreements to develop poverty reduction strategies as part of the highly indebted poor countries initiative, global free trade agreements and regional economic and labour mobility agreements (e.g. in ECOWAS ASEAN etc.) are likely to have important effects on fishing activity, and the scope of studies of fisheries governance needs to be enlarged to include more explicit consideration of how these processes can help or hinder the implementation of sustainable fisheries policies.
5.2 The role of national policies in fisheries and in poverty reduction
Fisheries policy has been carried along by the currents of three major governance and policy trends: decentralisation, market liberalisation and sustainable development (Allison, 2001). PRSPs share these orientations, so that policies informed by the FAO CCRF appear to complement the main thrust of PRSPs in combining global market integration with effective governance to generate sustained growth (Craig and Porter, 2003). Figure 3 identifies potential contributions of fishery sector objectives to poverty reduction strategies.
Although there are many synergies between poverty reduction strategies and fishery policy objectives, fisheries issues have a very limited profile in PRSP documents. In West Africa the sector was mentioned in only two out of 23 interim and full PRSPs, despite the economic and social importance of fisheries, particularly along the coast and around Lake Chad and the Niger Inland delta (SFLP, 2002). Lack of coverage of the fisheries sector in national poverty data collection is an important reason for this absence. Poverty assessments are used to derive policy priorities, which are then allocated funds through either Medium Term Expenditure Frameworks (MTEFs) or Poverty Action Funds (PAFs), so the absence of the fisheries sector from PRSPs can be significant - they could miss out on any funding allocation.
Most national fisheries policies avoid the ‘hard choices’. Since all the potential different contributions of small-scale fishing are apparently compatible with poverty reduction strategies, PRSPs provide little guidance as to which fishery goal should be prioritised. For fisheries policy to provide useful direction, the most straightforward way to make trade-offs between incompatible policy goals may be to set different policy priorities for different water-bodies or other non-overlapping sub-sectors of the fishery, as the Tanzanian Fisheries Master Plan has done (Allison, 2005).
Figure 3. Policy agendas typical of poverty reduction strategy plans (PRSPs),
with corresponding fisheries sector policy goals
(Allison, 2004)
The integration of fisheries development with broader poverty-focused development programmes would benefit from:
There are welcome signs that all these processes are underway in Africa, so that the continent's fishing people can continue to provide economic, social and cultural benefits to their countries.
5.3 Co-management as a pro-poor fisheries management framework132
Co-management is widely advocated as an organizational model to develop the means to sustain small-scale fisheries, following the perception that it is institutional failure that is largely responsible for resource degradation and loss of access to livelihood opportunity by the poor. Institutions fail when the pillars on which they rest are weak (Jentoft, 2004). The rules that regulate behaviour may be underdeveloped or poorly enforced; the normative standards may provide few incentives and little guidance; the knowledge that could inform decision-making may be inadequate. Thus, governance should improve if these pillars are strengthened. Any diagnosis of the problems and opportunities of institutions and how to improve them should therefore start here. However, institutional failure may also result from conditions outside the co-management initiative, in situations in which they are embedded or ‘nested’ in wider institutions. Fisheries management intuitions may also fail because of unsupportive legislation, inadequate financing, poorly organized user-groups etc. Thus, an investigation into the causes of intuitional deficiencies must broaden the perspective to include exogenous conditions.
Despite their variety and complexity, community based natural resources management (CBNRM) projects have a number of shared objectives (e.g. Kellert et al., 2000):
Thus, CBNRM contains a mixture of political, organizational, socio-economic, environmental and epistemological/institutional features, and despite the many possible obstacles to successful implementation, the idea of some form of partnership or dialogue between relevant citizen-groups and their government and of devolution of rights and responsibility to local-level actors is likely to remain the dominant form of fisheries governance in small-scale fisheries for some time.
The key issues and challenges in introducing and sustaining co-management systems are all fundamentally connected to issues of rights and their allocation.
Support from government is critical. Legislative and policy support is only the first step - if there is little political will and incentive for fisheries departments to relinquish control over resource management, then externally-driven project interventions will not result in sustainable outcomes. Perhaps paradoxically, a strong, supportive state is as important to the success of co-management as a strong, enforcing state was to the success of old-style ‘command and control’ fisheries management. Conversely, where citizens are up against unsupportive states, the potential of CBNRM to empower them is very limited. Older vocabularies about peasant struggles, class conflict and democracy are better able to name the problems and indicate the forms of collective actions through which they might be addressed (Li, 2002).
Elite capture of community-based development initiatives is a widely-recognised problem and there are many cases where the poor have not benefited from a transition from state to community-based natural resource management (e.g. Beck and Nesmith, 2001; Kumar, 2002). Mechanisms for ensuring equitable outcomes of co-management are critical to achieving a pro-poor orientation.
Few common-property systems in low-income countries are based on total exclusion of outsiders. Often, access regimes are filters rather than barriers, allowing partial access to outsiders on the basis of kinship, perceived need, or under historical reciprocal access or trading arrangements. Building co-management on these traditions may be more widely acceptable and enforceable than emphasising total exclusion of particular groups (e.g. migrant fisherfolk).
Financing co-management beyond donor or government-assisted transition periods can be difficult. Often, resource users are reluctant to commit funds to management until they can see returns from their investment. This has meant that successful donor-funded co-management projects have tended to require commitments of typically 6–12 years before they have been judged to be self-sustaining.
It is easier to self-finance a pro-rich development than a pro-poor one. The mutual support between rich entrepreneurs and government fishery officials and security personnel in Cambodia's Auction Lot system is an example of self-financed co-management that helped the rich become richer (FACT, 2002). Funding pro-poor development that has the backing of local-level elites is proving much more challenging.
Building trust between stakeholders is a key issue for project success. Trust-building exercises between groups that may have had conflictual relationships in the past (e.g. government fishery enforcement agents and resource users, migrant and resident fisherfolk) is an essential activity before inclusive, multi-stakeholder management becomes a realistic option. Where there are known to be serious disputes over resource access that might overwhelm existing capacities for self-reorganization, conflict management assessment (CMA) can help to determine what form of intervention is appropriate (see Jones and Warner, 1998).
Co-management is a political project that involves the redistribution of power alongside the reallocation of use rights and control over resources. When the political dimension of co-management is not explicitly recognised then unexpected outcomes can occur, such as new conflicts or the exacerbation of existing ones. The rhetoric of co-management often refers to empowerment but seldom considers that one group gaining power often means that another group has their power and influence diminished. If an empowering vision of co-management is the aim (Figure 4) then the process needs to be explicitly connected to decentralisation initiatives. Decentralisation, however, is itself often conceived in technocratic rather than political terms - as a means of improving efficiency of government service delivery and collecting tax revenues more efficiently rather than as a means of giving citizens a stronger voice in government and making government more accountable for their actions.
Critics of the ‘design principles’ approach to understanding CBNRM success suggest that historical and ecological context are so influential in the emergence of CPR management systems that the search for rules or design principles is fruitless (Mosse, 2003). In a similar vein, Hara and Raakjær Nielsen (2003) argue that, for Africa, each specific fishery will require co-management design to be tailor-made. Thus, the very relevance of the transferability of ‘lessons learned’ is a subject of continued debate in the commons literature. Our own view is that lessons on good practice in institutional change are transferable, while technical design features of individual commons management systems are likely to require locally adapted designs.
The existence of an incentive to participate in co-management is a fundamental pre-requisite. This is usually, but not always, an economic incentive - there must be some advantage to be gained by foregoing individual strategies in favour of collective ones. This applies to all participants in co-management, whether they are fisherfolk, traditional leaders or government officials. Co-management usually requires some participants to relinquish current benefits and powers and grant them to others. Government departments are effectively being asked to participate in their own down-sizing and local elites may be asked to devolve more of their power over resource allocation decisions to people they may regard as their social inferiors (the poor, women, youths etc). Fisherfolk are often asked to cut back their fishing effort. In all of these cases, the incentives to comply need to be identified and communicated to all participants and ways to secure future benefits devised. Where there are no incentives for compliance, it may have to be externally enforced. This may be the case where resources have become degraded to the point where the poor cannot imagine that their share of any increased benefit would make it worth all the effort of organising for joint NR management or where power relations are such that the elite-capture of any rehabilitated resource is a very real prospect (Baumann and Farrington, 2003).
1 = setting objectives
2 = knowledge base
3 = Implementing decisions
Figure 4 - Alternative visions of co-management
(Adapted from Raakjær Nielsen et al, 2004)
Although moving from state-based management to co-management is not always an easy process, the range of positive experiences from around the world (reviewed in Raakjær Nielsen et al., 2004 and Wilson et al., 2003) are encouraging. The tensions between improving access to fishing livelihoods for the poor and marginal, while effectively managing the resources, lie at the heart of the co-management debate, and in the resolution of these tensions comes the hope for sustainable economy-society-environment systems.
6. CONCLUSIONS
6.1 Directions for fisheries development suggested by livelihoods analysis
Our evolving understanding of poverty in fisheries and the multiple roles that fishing may play in the rural economy seems likely to shift the emphasis of future fisheries development away from attempts to improve fisherfolks' incomes and towards interventions aimed at reducing vulnerability of fishing-dependent populations. Despite often having higher incomes than people mainly engaged in other sectors of the rural economy, small-scale fisherfolk are often vulnerable due to insecurity of tenure over both land and water resources and to political and social marginalisation.
All the livelihoods studies conducted thus far have indicated that maintaining a diverse portfolio of activities in addition to fishing is important to coastal, river floodplain and lakeshore households. Fishing is a high-risk occupation and one prone to seasonal and cyclical fluctuations in stock size and location, some of which are highly unpredictable in occurrence. Diversification reduces the risk of livelihood failure by spreading it across more than one income source. It also helps to overcome the uneven use of assets (such as a fishing boat) caused by seasonality, to reduce vulnerability, to generate financial resources in the absence of credit markets, and it confers a host of other advantages in the presence of widespread market failures and uncertainties.
Recognition of this cross-sectoral mobility is overturning previous notions that fisherfolk were marginal specialists stuck in their present occupation and unable to turn to others. It also challenges policies that seek to ‘professionalise’ part-time or ‘subsistence’ fisherfolk, as the diverse livelihood strategies observed are often sensible adaptations to the uncertainties of fishing. These adaptations have the useful by-product of reducing dependency on fishery resources. Specialisation promotes dependency, which is obviously undesirable in the face of declining stocks.
Livelihoods analysis has also shed light on how local-scale, informal institutions work in practice. This is most clearly seen in the cases where mobile fish stocks are exploited by migrant fisherfolk, with informal reciprocal access agreements being the main means of controlling movement and exploitation patterns. Fisheries management agencies, unaware of these arrangements, have sometimes sought to impose a system of fixed, territorial boundaries on these highly adapted, flexible management systems (Allison and Ellis, 2001).
Adopting a livelihoods view of small-scale fishing in Africa, Asia and Latin America is leading to policy-makers now seeing small-scale fisherfolk, not just as poor, backward, marginal and problematic, but as potentially important contributors to the rural economy and potential focal points for market development in areas otherwise remote from the cash economy. Migrant fisherfolk are often revealed to be welcome trading partners of resident communities rather than transient marauders. Livelihoods analysis has thus contributed to revealing and quantifying the hidden role of small-scale fisheries in the rural economies of developing countries, strengthening the case for their inclusion in national poverty reduction strategy programmes (Allison, 2005; Thorpe et al., 2005).
Analysis of the success of fisheries development policies since 1950 (Neiland, 2004) adds support to the conclusions of livelihoods analyses. The most successful types of fishery intervention - in terms of their short and long-term poverty alleviation benefits, equity, sustainability, technical feasibility and ease and cost of implementation - were projects to improve fisheries management (St Lucia), re-allocate fisheries resources to favour the small-scale sector (Indonesia) and increase economic growth and diversity (thereby raising opportunity incomes and diversification options) through integrated rural development (Malaysia).
6.2 Being realistic on what can be achieved through fisheries development
Poverty will obviously not be solved by fisheries management and development alone. Neither will fisheries management problems necessarily be solved by wider poverty reduction. We contend, however, that in small-scale fisheries in developing countries (and possibly in many developed ones too), dealing with some of the dimensions of poverty (vulnerability in particular) will go a long way to addressing fisheries unsustainability for inshore and inland fisheries, by reducing some of the risks and uncertainties that fisherfolk live with, and that are among the reasons why it is entirely rational for many people to fish unsustainably.
There are at least three unavoidable problems to confound expectations of what can be achieved through improved fisheries management and development policy and practice.
Fisheries cannot fulfil all the social and economic goals that we would like them to. Fishery policy makers and resource users have to make the hard choices between a number of possible functions, on the basis of which one fits best with their existing situation and with wider national development priorities.
Much of what happens in fisheries is driven by what goes on outside the sector, in government, the rural economy, and in processes of global change. This limits the extent to which fisheries scientists and managers can address factors of unsustainability in fisheries.
Uncertainty pervades fisheries management and things don't always turn out the way we think they will. For example, it would be nice to be able to identify, in advance, points at which environmental or social change becomes effectively irreversible so we can manage to prevent irreversibility.
None of these reasons deters us from tying to understand and manage fisheries better. We are therefore also able to offer three reassuring responses to the above points:
Whichever function any fishery can fulfil, it offers a potentially important contribution to wider processes of development. Clarity of objectives, negotiated and agreed with those who are involved in the fishery, can help to address unsustainability brought about by pursuing multiple, incompatible goals (or from not having a goal at all).
Fisheries development actors have realised that integrating fisheries with wider development policy is necessary, and are raising the profile of fisheries issues with government and wider civil society. Where fisheries are important and influential, they can achieve representation (and funding) in broader development planning. Also, successful institutional and governance innovation can spread to other sectors. Innovations in fisheries co-management may help to build social capital that can then be utilised to support other local-level development initiatives, irrespective of sector.
Fisherfolk have long lived with uncertainty and have evolved a variety of robust risk-management strategies to cope with it. Management agencies may be able to build their management systems on these principles.
6.3 Responding to identified ‘factors of unsustainability’
We conclude by drawing on some of the ideas outlined in this paper to addressing a selection of the many questions posed in the terms of reference to this workshop (referred to by number):
It is not possible to manage any fishery without recognising and accounting for its linkages with the wider socio-economy (1.6). We need to see fishing as something that people do to earn (usually part) of their living, but that is not the only feature of their lives that has a bearing on livelihood outcome. Poor internal security affecting fisherfolk's ability to invest in livestock to reduce dependence of fisheries (Malawi), collapse of the agricultural economy leading to a huge influx of migrant fishers (Senegal) and rapid urbanisation and economic growth providing alterative occupational choices (the ‘Asian Tigers’) are just some of the many examples of how fishing and other sectors of the economy - both locally and at macro-level, are linked in ways that either support or undermine sustainability. The dynamic nature of such links also makes sustainability rather difficult to assess in conventional terms, and it even challenges it as a valid goal for policy (the Norwegian wooden ski metaphor - Hannesson, 2004, this workshop).
Successful and effective participation of small-scale fisherfolk in fishery management processes (1.7) is dependent on reducing the worst extremes of poverty. Where wealth inequalities and poor governance generate inequalities of power that act to exclude the poor from decision-making processes (management rights), the hope for improved sustainability is a vain one. Without simultaneously working to reduce poverty and vulnerability of fisherfolk, expecting them to participate in co-management is optimistic at best.
Similarly, there can be no equitable allocation and viable defence of property rights without a significant decrease in inequalities of wealth and power within fishing communities and between fisherfolk and external actors. Empowerment through community-building can help achieve this, even in the face of continuing income inequalities. On-going initiatives on Tonle Sap are a worthy attempt at this (Schmidt, 2004, this workshop).
The allocation of rights is supposed to bring responsible behaviour (2.1), but to those unable to access, defend or benefit from rights granted to them, this is unlikely to come about. Legal recognition of rights is an important first step, but support is needed to realise the remaining elements of stable property rights.
In many cases, fishery management agencies see granting improved or exclusive rights to fish as being sufficient to solve the problems of poverty in fisheries. But if fishers have no access to other assets, or remain vulnerable to other shocks, granting rights over aquatic spaces and/or the fish in them will not reduce overall uncertainty. ‘Responsible behaviour’ will only occur if some benefit in behaving responsibly can be discerned. While fishers continue to be vulnerable to risks resulting from poor governance, ranging from violence by the powerful (Tonle Sap film) to predation by rent-seeking officials, they are unlikely to see much benefit in behaving in what outsiders might term a ‘responsible fashion, even if they do manage to secure legal rights to a resource. Vulnerability reduction, community-building and improved democratisation, encapsulated in the much-overused words ‘empowerment’ and ‘building civil society’ are a key part of any poverty reduction strategy that seeks to foster responsible behaviour.
We agree that the main factors of unsustainability are largely known (1.3) although some of the psycho-cultural dimensions that prevent behavioural adjustment from unsustainable to sustainable behaviour are underemphasised. Issues such as loss of community coherence, cultural stress and fatalism as a risk-rationalisation strategy are too seldom remarked upon. Thus, current social science research in fisheries does not address all the factors of sustainability (3.5). Much could be learned by comparison with other groups who confront similar risk environments in pursuit of their livelihoods. These might include nomadic pastoralists and small-scale miners.
The experience of indigenous communities in the Americas and Australasia, whose sources of livelihood and cultural survival were threatened by rapid social and economic change, may also shed light on what is happening or has happened in many small-scale fisheries. Reassertion of cultural rights has reversed the spiral of decline that many such communities experienced. Interest in culturally and ecologically sustainable development has recently increased among many indigenous communities, and it follows from empowerment, reduction in discrimination, and a growing confidence in asserting their identity. There may be useful lessons to assist traditional fishing communities (many of which are also pursued by indigenous groups that have been marginalised and are threatened with cultural extinction) to rediscover their vision of the future. The renaissance of community-based marine resource management in Oceania provides a good example of how legal and political recognition can help to restore and adapt cultural values to contemporary situations, and rebuild confidence in the future and commitment to sustainability (Johannes, 2002).
Responding to multidisciplinarity (3.8): The SLA can help us to identify existing strengths in the small-scale fisheries sector and build upon those to ensure that inshore fishing continues to make important contributions to poverty alleviation. But the SLA is not a ‘magic wand’ that can solve existing problems of overcapacity and declining fish stocks, it can merely help to broaden and deepen the search for solutions to this overriding problem. It can also help to identify interventions to alleviate poverty in fishing communities (e.g. by reducing vulnerability, building social capital, dealing with corruption and weak governance, improving service delivery in health, education) that do not directly lead to increased fishing effort.
A major challenge to fisheries sustainability is the observation that demand for fish will increase for the foreseeable future (Delgado et al., 2003). Demand management is a hitherto neglected instrument of control in fisheries management, although it is becoming a significant means of limiting over-consumption of other scarce natural resources (e.g. in water resources management). The impacts of reducing demand (e.g. from export and urban markets) on the small-scale fisheries of poor countries could be ambiguous. Losing markets is seldom good for poverty alleviation, but may reduce pressure on resources. Ecological sustainability would be won at the cost of fisheries' contribution to livelihood sustainability. A middle course is provided by market standards that foster sustainable practices, in the hope that socially and environmentally aware consumers will make choices that support sustainability. This is likely to apply mostly to rich consumers in wealthy countries, and therefore to export-orientated fisheries in LDCs that supply these markets.
Poverty has proven persistent, both in fisheries and more generally. It even persists in the world's wealthiest countries. It seems likely that lack of progress with poverty alleviation in much of sub-Saharan Africa will compromise the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (Sahn and Stifel, 2003). Inequalities are arguably a structural feature of any market-based system of governance, but gross inequalities are not socially and politically sustainable, as the 18th century French aristocracy and the last Czar of Russia discovered to their cost. Compliance by the poor with fishery management goals set by the rich will likewise remain untenable while poverty and inequality and political and social exclusion persist in fisheries. The poor will deploy the ‘weapons of the weak’ (Scott, 1987) - a diverse array of passive and active acts of resistance - to subvert rules imposed on them by the powerful in either states or local elites. Without empowerment, progress towards sustainability through improved fishery management will be blocked by the very people it claims to serve.
Poverty is unsustainable, inside or outside the fishery. It is time for all involved in fisheries development to make a concerted effort to directly address issues of equity, empowerment and poverty alleviation in fishing communities. The future sustainability of fish stocks may depend on the outcomes of those efforts.
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