This final section demonstrates how the social and biological characteristics of floodplain fisheries interact strongly with each other to determine the prospects for effective management. It is argued that these prospects depend on three dominant physical characteristics of inland fisheries: their waterbody morphology; their human settlement patterns; and their fish mobility. It considers the ways in which these characteristics differ across fisheries and, with reference to the preceding chapters and to a range of case-studies, explores the implications of these for management regimes. Such physical differences serve as an important influence on the types of relationship between individuals, communities and government agencies in the fisheries. Effective management requires strong participation from all of these stakeholders. This section discusses the existing relationships between such players at the DFID study sites and elsewhere, and concludes with observations about the prospects for participatory management in different types of floodplain fisheries. Summary guidelines on the requirements prospects for participatory management in the different systems are given in Parts 1.3 and 1.4 of Part 1.
Contemporary development debates are awash with vague usage of the term participation, yet the concept is surrounded by such a rosy glow that its use is often permitted, both in debate and in practice, in an under-defined sense. As noted by a range of commentators (Cohen and Uphoff 1980, White 1996), participation can mean many things to many people. Indeed, the very vagueness of the term is a burden, encouraging false perceptions and inflated expectations. In their classic deconstruction of the concept, Cohen and Uphoff recognise that there are many ways in which people might participate. Not only do we have to clarify what it is that people are participating in, but also we need to understand who it is that is participating. Thus participatory management in inland fisheries might range from: involvement in setting the policy agenda, to contributing to the writing of the rules governing the fishery, to having responsibility in implementing the rules in the fishery, to sharing in the benefits (or the costs) of the management regime. In other words it might range from strong to weak forms or, as White (1996) puts it in a recent cautionary article, from the nominal to the transformative.
Whatever from it takes, however, the participatory management of common resources is fundamentally about governance. It is about who does or does not decide what rules will be applied to the exploitation of the resource and how those rules are implemented. It is, unavoidably, a political concept. Even where attempts are made to present it neutrally, in instrumental form, as a means of achieving greater effectiveness or efficiency, it still is founded upon a distribution of power. It perhaps implies a reform of that distribution of power, and in turn the process of participatory management will further shape the distribution of power. In this sense, a key element of the assessment of participatory management is establishing the existing ‘real’ structures of governance in the fishery.
Governance and biology are interlocked in natural resources. The structures of governance of natural resources are shaped to a considerable extent by the biological characteristics of the resource. In fisheries, generally, it is important that the fish are not visible and that the resource is mobile, sometimes over long distances. In inland fisheries, as opposed to marine fisheries, the relationship of human settlement to the resource and the fact that the fishery resource may only represent one dimension of a complex ecosystem are each complicating factors.
When one introduces the question of poverty to the picture, the politics of governance and participatory management become all the more acute. If, as is conventionally the case, participatory management is seen as a way for the poor to participate in the management of the resource, then the challenge to the existing distribution of power is likely to be all the more substantial.
In developing countries it is often assumed, in policy circles at least, that inland fisheries are being over-fished. In addressing this, two of the most common aims of management are either to reduce the effort applied to the exploitation of the resource, or to improve its productivity. Both of these objectives have important distributional implications. In reducing fishing effort, one can either exclude some people, for all or part of the time from the fishery, or one can require stinting, whereby the overall fishing effort will be reduced. Who is to be excluded, or upon whom stinting will have the greatest (income-reducing) impact are obviously matters of contention in any society. Where there are to be improvements in the productivity of a fishery, one is potentially introducing new flows of income, and competition over these in a poor country is equally likely to be intense.
Both of these goals of management are concerned with controlling access to the fishery and the ability to control access is affected by its spatial characteristics. As this paper will go on to show the spatial characteristics of the fishery then interplay with the social organisation of fishing communities to set constraints on the possibilities of participatory management control.
The subject of participation is reasonably well studied for marine artisanal fisheries, but there has been less work done on tropical inland fisheries. The natural resource attributes necessary for successful participatory management, in the form of Territorial Use Rights in Fisheries (TURFs) were determined in the 1980s (Panayotou 1982, Christy 1982). Since then, an extensive literature has developed on ‘co-management’ in fisheries, the sharing of management between state and community. Drawing heavily upon Ostrom (1990), Pomeroy and Williams (1994) listed eleven conditions likely to improve the prospects for co-management. These conditions cut across the social, biological and political characteristics of the fishery (Box 1).
| Box 1. Conditions improving the prospects for successful co-management |
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| Source: Pomeroy and Williams, 1994 |
These conditions represent a ‘wish list’ and it is unlikely that all conditions will be met in any particular fishery. Several of the above conditions refer to the effectiveness of the state in its relations with those communities to which it might seek to devolve management responsibilities. A realistic evaluation of the role and condition of the state is therefore a vital foundation to participatory management. Though inland fisheries often represent an undervalued development resource for the nation, states still can not be expected readily to give away ultimate control over their development resources and development direction. The following material attempts to clarify the importance of the above points from the perspective of floodplain fisheries.
As described in Section 5.1, the state management of Asian floodplain river fisheries is dominated by the use of spatial leasing or licensing systems. These systems are sometimes supported by technical regulations such as mesh size limits or gear bans, closed seasons, and reserve areas, although the extent of enforcement of these is highly variable. ‘Management’ of these fisheries essentially consists of a transfer of responsibility for the resource from the government to the fishers, for a defined period of time, usually in exchange for some lease or license fee. License holders participate in the management process by setting the numbers of fishermen in their waterbodies, and their fishing gear use, but may have little real say in the overall management of the fishery. Licensing systems thus usually form the core of the current relationship between government, fishing communities and fishing households.
While there are general similarities in the spatial licensing systems operated in the DFID study sites in Bangladesh and Indonesia, there are important differences both in their form and in their implementation. Even within each country there is a significant amount of regional variation in the systems of managing access to inland fisheries. In both countries there are also significant problems of governance. The case studies illustrate a number of general issues which underpin these governance problems and which in turn have implications for participatory management, including:
inconsistent central government leadership, which serves to undermine the relationship between government and fishing communities;
the perceived failure to implement government policy either through corruption or by policy capture by powerful members of communities; and
the value of the resource and the degree of commercial orientation of the fishery.
Central governments in developing countries often overestimate their ability to manage inland fisheries. Such government over-ambition or over-management of resources can be a means of weakening both community identity with a resource and community confidence in government (see Bromley and Chapagain, 1984). The pronouncements of central government in some Asian countries over recent years have served to considerably reduce their perceived legitimacy in the management of inland fisheries. Continual changes in central government policy tends to undermine confidence in management systems and tends to create a policy and management vacuum. This vacuum can often be filled by more wealthy and powerful sections of society, who can insert their own management regimes. In Bangladesh, for example, it is not unusual for wealthy households who effectively control waterbodies to operate their own private police-forces to implement their management strategies.
Implementation failure in inland fisheries also serves to weaken the perceived legitimacy of state governance. Where the government system has been seen as favouring one set of fishing households over another (e.g. wealthy over poor), there can be a withdrawal of compliance with the management regime. Moreover, that implementation breakdown may be further exacerbated by the new central government policies, which reduces the incentives of the regional authorities, who hitherto have had an important role to play in the management system. Where corruption is evident in the system, governance will be threatened with bankruptcy. Systems of participatory management must be built on foundations of trust. Years of erosion of community confidence in government, because of either ineffectiveness or the naked venality of officials involved in the management systems, represent a poor base upon which to embark on participatory management arrangements.
Where the inland fishery has a high value and is of commercial significance the problems of governance are often all the more difficult. In comparison to floodplain fisheries in both Bangladesh and other Indonesian catchments, the River Lempuing fishery may be seen as strongly commercially oriented (Section 5.1.6). The complete licensing system used in this catchment creates opportunities for very high catch rates per fisherman (2.2–3.3 tons per year). The high catches per fisherman are maintained, via the licensing system, by tightly restricting the numbers of fishermen who have access to the fishery. In this case, there is a coincidence of interests between those fishermen who have access and the licensing authorities. The high value of the fishery permits good incomes for the fishermen and allows administrators to levy high license fees. Compared to Bangladesh, much higher percentages of the catch values can be taken by administrators as licence fees, while from the fishermens' perspective, the returns are still large.
While this system has been stable over recent years, the commercial attractiveness makes it particularly vulnerable to breakdown. Apart from the problem of new central government regulations undermining the stability of the relationship between fishing community and administration, the value of the fishery may attract powerful outside interests to invest in the fishery. Should these outside interests use the open license system to capture a large proportion of the value of the fishery, then the community identification with the fishery will break down.
Furthermore, the current accommodation between administration and fishermen is achieved because of the peculiar characteristics of the Lempuing fishing community. This is a relatively homogeneous community with a strong leadership, few ethnic divisions and relatively little variation in wealth between individuals (Heady, McGregor and Winnett, 1995). No individual or faction appears to be capable of capturing the access to the fishery to the exclusion of others. This is in striking contrast to the situation in most fisheries in Bangladesh. Notably, inland fisheries in Bangladesh tend to be just as productive as the Lempuing (both achieving catches of around 100 kg per hectare per year), but the Bangladesh catches are split between ten times as many fishermen (0.2–0.4 tons per year, per fisherman; Section 5.1.6). Competition over the resource tends to be much more fierce in Bangladesh, with factions and faction-leaders seeking to capture exclusive access to the most valuable parts of the fishery for themselves, individually, and their faction followers. Poor fishing households are the ‘cannon-fodder’ of factional groupings, who must simply be fed to keep them in line. This can be achieved by their having access to the fisheries during the monsoon season, and then by their selective admission by license-holders to marginal parts of the fishery.
Factionalism deeply penetrates the administration in Bangladesh. In contrast to the Lempuing, official license fees are a small component of the total catch values, but informal payments and the political, factional alliances between the rural wealthy and the lower reaches of the administration represent an important feature of the licensing system. In Bangladesh the commercial value of the fishery could be similar to that of the Lempuing in Indonesia, but it is diluted by the large labour component of the enterprise. This large labour component is a defining feature of the social and political structure of Bangladesh.
A high commercial value in a fishery thus makes it a more attractive resource to capture. This can either weaken or strengthen the effectiveness of governance in the fishery. This will depend on both the degree of identification between the interests of the administration and fishing communities, and the social and political organisation of the fishing communities.
As described in Section 5.1, inland floodplain river fisheries in the tropics are often managed by dividing the resource into spatial units and licensing the control of those units to fishermen in one way or another. This subdivision of fishing rights is enabled in floodplain river fisheries by the physical characteristics of the resource. River channels may be easily subdivided into sections by reference to well known local landmarks, as may sections of floodplain or individual pools, particularly where these are separated from each other by pieces of higher ground. Similar subdivisions are also commonly made along the shoreline for the management of ‘TURFs’in coastal fisheries (Panayotou, 1982; Christy, 1982), but are less often used in more open resources such as large lakes and offshore marine fisheries.
This section attempts to clarify the importance of spatial factors for the management of floodplain fisheries. It is shown that three factors are crucial to our understanding of these fisheries: the spatial morphology of the resource; the relationship between waterbodies and human settlements; and the movement patterns of fish. The interplay of these social and biological factors determines the physical possibilities of successful participatory management. An improved understanding of these spatial factors is particularly important for fishery resources, because of the fact that fish move between different waters, unlike trees or crops. Having the rights to fish a given waterbody does not necessarily give exclusive rights to exploit the fish contained in it. Fishermen, of course, know that fish migrate, but due to the murky waters, seem to have only an incomplete perception of their movements on which to base their fishing and management strategies.
Tropical inland water resources include many different waterbody types, from the smallest streams, to meandering rivers and their floodplains, and from small borrow-pit ponds to the largest lakes. Obviously, it is easier for a householder to manage his own small pond, than it is for one or more communities to equitably divide up the resources of a large, shared lake. The size of a waterbody usually determines the number of people and communities interested in its resources: larger waters are then more likely to demand greater effort and innovation for their successful participatory management. While size is therefore a constraint, this does not mean that it will be completely impractical to manage large waterbodies, as is shown in the following section.
After size, the most important factor determining the management of inland waters is the degree of enclosure or containment of fish stocks. Waterbodies such as household ponds, village ponds, or ox-bow lakes, which are fully enclosed clearly offer better management possibilities than other waters such as floodplain rivers. In the latter case, when fish come and go freely between the waters of different communities, there is little incentive for a single village to invest in raising local productivity. In the former case, when a community is more certain that only it will receive the benefits of management, rather than its neighbours, it has more incentive to be responsible and proactive in the conservation and enhancement of its resources.
Participatory management techniques which require significant investments are therefore mainly employed in enclosed waters. These techniques often involve fish stocking in some form, such as extensive aquaculture in household ponds, ‘rice-fish’ production in enclosed paddies, or the community stocking of fish in village ponds. On a larger scale, recent work in Bangladesh has demonstrated the potential of community stocking of oxbow lakes separated from their rivers by fish screens (see Box 2). The enhancement of fish production on open floodplains has also recently been tried by stocking open floodplains (Payne, 1996). This produces a fair degree of controversy. Significant gains in production are possible, but it is unclear how the benefits are distributed. In Bangladesh, poor fishing households have been adversely affected by measures to further exclude them from the fishery as its value has increased. There is also an important cost-recovery question related to such action and further work is required to determine how stocking could be privately financed in such open access systems.
| Box 2 - The Oxbow Lakes Small Scale Fishermen Project in Bangladesh |
| The Second Oxbow Lakes Project (OLP), run by the Bangladesh Department of Fisheries (DoF) and the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC), manages 23 oxbow lakes with a total area of around 1,400ha. The project aims at self-management of the lakes for both fishing and fish farming, by sharing the benefits from the resource between members of local communities in an equitable manner (Middendorp et al, 1996). |
| An ox-bow lake or ‘baor’ is an old bend of a river which has become cut off from the main channel by a sudden shift in flows. Ox-bow lakes are thus usually deep, and isolated from main river channels, though some connection may remain or be excavated in the form of canals. Project activities are managed by the beneficiaries themselves, organised in Lake Management Groups (LMG) which include a Lake Fishing Team (LFT) and a Fish Farming Group (FFG). Use rights to the baors are leased by the DoF to the LMGs, and the fees are shared pro rata between the LFTs and the FFGs depending on the area of water used for each. Only licensed members of the LFT are allowed to fish, and poaching is most successfully reduced when all villages around the baor are represented in both the LFT and the FFG. Members of the LFTs and FFGs have up to fifty years of secure access to these resources from the DoF and permanent access to credit from BRAC. |
| In this secure and enclosed environment, both chinese and indian major carps have been stocked in the baors since 1991, and fish production (not including fish farming) increased from 137 to 565kg/ha by 1995. Fish farming in the the ponds around the lake margins began in 1995, and is expected to produce far greater yields than than the open water catches. The project is now pushing for an overall government policy on ‘closed waterbodies’, and extension of these approaches to other waterbody types. |
The large and valuable fishery of the River Lempuing Marga Danau district was described in Section 5.1.2. This fishery is primarily managed for the financial gain of local district administrators and fishermen, and fishermen always try to take the maximum possible catches in each year they hold a license. The Fisheries Service ‘Dinas Perikanan’ have established one waterbody as a reserve (Figure 2.3, study site 1), but has little idea of its effectiveness: valuable fish species such as Notopterus chitala, Osphronemus gorami and the giant prawn Macrobrachium rosenbergii have declined in numbers in recent years.
During comparisons of the River Lempuing with other smaller fisheries in Indonesia, it became apparent that the Lempuing fishery is so heavily exploited partly because no single community has any permanent association with individual waterbodies. When fishermen from the local town of Pedamaran obtain a license for a waterbody, they set up temporary houses or ‘pondoks’ at their new fishing site, and live there more or less permanently for the next year. The River Lempuing has 35 separate auction units, each with its own community of around 4–30 fishermen living in pondoks (Figure 2.3). Knowing that they may not get the licence again in the next year's competitive auction, fishermen always fish as hard as possible to catch fish, and do not take any measures to conserve resources for the future.
In other Indonesian districts, with less extensive floodplain resources, the smaller waterbodies are more often permanently associated with the communities adjacent to them (Section 5.1.3). It appears that this has not happened in the River Lempuing due to the large size of the floodplains (around 100km2 during the flood season) and the depth of the floodwaters. The large scale of this resource seems to have restricted the encroachment of roads and non-fishing land use practices. In contrast to the Lempuing situation, in other locations where waterbodies are more permanently settled in Indonesia, it has been found that the communities do take steps to conserve their resources and participate in their management (Box 3).
The attitudes of communities towards their local natural resources clearly depend on the permanence of their association with, or ‘ownership’ of, such resources. As mentioned earlier, the clearest, most permanent associations have commonly evolved for the smaller aquatic resources such as medium sized floodplain lakes and ponds. The River Lempuing lake district is too large for self-management by any single community, and the more active role taken by the kabupaten administration there may be seen as a sensible system for this catchment.
While participatory management may presently be strongest for small waterbodies associated with single communities, new projects in both Indonesia and Brazil are now developing approaches for coordinated management of large waterbodies shared between many communities (Box 4). These new approaches are based on allocating permanent fishing rights to communities living within national parks. With long-term interests in the productivity of the national park, fishermen are proving to be capable guardians of their resources, and may participate strongly in their management.
Fishermen in tropical floodplain rivers are well aware that fish migrate, since they catch them in regular annual cycles in their barrier traps placed at any suitable bottlenecks throughout the catchment. In the River Lempuing for instance, penetak barriers are built right across the main river channel to catch fish moving up and down the river, while kilung barriers are set where floodplain waters drain off the floodplains back into the rivers (Section 4). Though fishermen know that fish move, they seem to have little idea of the actual extent of migration, since they cannot directly observe the movements in the murky river waters. Nevertheless, fishermen generally place their barrier traps at the downstream end of their waterbodies, and obviously realise that fish which manage to pass through their traps will move into their neighbours' waters. They therefore construct such barrier traps very carefully to try to catch as many fish as possible before they emigrate from their control.
The behaviour patterns of the different floodplain ‘blackfish’ and ‘whitefish’ were briefly described in Section 3.2.1. Blackfish species are able to survive the dry season in deoxygenated ponds by their possession of air-breathing organs, in various forms, and tend to lead fairly residential lifestyles, only moving back and forth between the floodplains and the dry season ponds. Whitefish species, on the other hand, can not tolerate deoxygenated conditions and must return back to the flowing river channels or larger lakes to survive over the dry season. Whitefish species then tend to be more highly migratory than blackfish, often undertaking both ‘longitudinal’ migrations up and down rivers and ‘lateral’ migrations on and off the floodplains.
| Box 3. Community management of ‘village-owned’ waterbodies in Jambi, Indonesia |
| Traditional community management of village waterbodies was found to be successfully applied in two villages in Jambi province, mid-Sumatra, Indonesia, as studied by the ‘Fisheries Dynamics’ project (Hoggarth et al, in press (a)). In these villages, Arang Arang and Jambi Kecil (case study sites 3 and 4 in Figure 2.3), measures were used to restrict overexploitation of fish stocks during the dry season. In both these villages, the local waters were exclusively fished by the village community, and the protected waterbodies were the deepest ones in the area. |
| In Jambi Kecil village, in a bend of the Batanghari River, none of the waterbodies were auctioned, and fishing was freely available to all over the flood season. In the dry season, however, three lubuk pusaka or deep pools on the secondary river, Sungei Berembang were managed as ‘sacred reserves’ (Figure 2.3). In these waters, fishing was only permitted on ceremonial hari berkarang fishing days, held once every 2–3 years and only when fish stocks were thought abundant enough to avoid threatening the sustainability of future stocks. Such events had been held in this village since before living memory and all members of the village were allowed to take part, with the best fishing positions going to those with the highest status. |
| In Arang Arang district, some local waterbodies were auctioned for fishing, but only to village members, thereby maintaining accountability of fishing activities within the village. Some other waters, such as the channel leading between the Sungei Kumpeh and a large lake Danau Arang Arang (Figure 2.3) were maintained as open access resources for all village members. Fishing in the lake itself, however, has always been restricted to small, inefficient gears. Fish drives are only permitted in the deepest parts of the lake in a ceremonial, one-day hari berkarang, open to all as in Jambi Kecil, but restrained to avoid overexploitation of pre-spawning stocks during the dry season. |
| In contrast to these two village districts, the village of Muara Jambi (and most other villages in this region) had no restrictions on fishing activities at any time of year. The permanent lake Danau Gerang in Muara Jambi district could have been used to conserve fish stocks over the dry season, but was not protected due to its remoteness from the main village. Danau Gerang was, in fact, handed over to Muara Jambi from the neighbouring Rukam village as settlement for an ancient dispute, and the lake is now still fished largely by Rukam villagers. Though Muara Jambi licenses this water along with others in the district, dry season fishing is not restricted due to the difficulties of enforcing regulations out of sight of the main village. Another waterbody closer to Muara Jambi, previously operated as a dry season reserve with a hari berkarang was recently abandoned when its productivity declined due to siltation. |
With such variations in migratory behaviour, it is not surprising to find that those fishing communities which do conserve their local resources, in geographic terms, also concentrate on the more resident blackfish species. In the two Jambi communities which protected dry season stocks (Box 3), the reserve areas were perceived as mainly beneficial for the local species. Appropriate tools for the management of such blackfish species were described in Part 1. Those whitefish species known to migrate strongly up and down rivers, and between the waters of many communities were never conserved by the Jambi communities. Reserves were only used in floodplain waterbodies, and never in the main river with its more shared whitefish stocks. Luckily, such riverine whitefish are probably supported by adult breeding stocks resident in the large main river systems where overexploitation is more difficult anyway due to the scale of the waters. Many of the whitefish species have, however, declined in large river systems, including Pangasius catfish species and Notopterus chitala on the River Lempuing, and all the major carps in Bangladesh.
| Box 4. Fishermen as guardians of national park resources in Brazil and Indonesia |
| DFID have supported two projects where artisanal fishermen from remote communities work with national parks staff in a joint effort to conserve both traditional lifestyles and natural resources. This is a special situation where conservation is the highest priority, but limited fishing activities are granted with guaranteed long-term rights to provide local people with incentives to conserve resources. Both national parks are very large and remote from populated areas, and have fish stocks with extensive migration patterns in and around the resource and between the different exploiting villages. The key to successful management appears to lie in a hierarchical and spatial structure for communication where all the stakeholders of the resource can be heard. |
| The 1,250km2 Danau Sentarum Wildlife Reserve (DSWR), of the UK-Indonesia Tropical Forestry Management Project is based on the floodplain lakes complex of the middle Kapuas River in West Kalimantan, Indonesia (Deschamps, 1994; Dudley, 1996). The DSWR was gazetted as a reserve in 1981, and includes two areas of traditionally protected forests. Management of the park is ultimately under the control of the KSDA Forestry and Conservation Authority. The DFID project was ambitious but not entirely successful as shown below. |
| Spatially, the DSWR was divided up into six ‘Community Management Areas’ or CMAs, each including 5–7 villages and their surrounding waters. The sizes of the CMAs ware selected to ensure that village representatives could easily attend management meetings within their own CMA. Fishery management within each village is based on the traditional adat laws already used in the area, which were recorded in detail and well publicised by the project. This information alone reduced conflicts between the villages over their shared resources. The project attempted to introduce a hierarchical management system for the park, based on four levels of administration. At the lowest village level, a village liason officer was to represent its interests in meetings of its CMA - the next level above it. Above the CMAs, the Reserve Management Unit was to be responsible for the overall management of the reserve, and to comprise two village liason officers from each CMA, and the KSDA reserve manager. At the highest level, the Provincial Steering Committee was to include members of the provincial level government agencies for forestry, planning and fisheries, and to be responsible for guidance and support of the RMU, and relationships with outside influences such as logging companies and other provinces. This spatial and hierarchical structure was designed to ensure that two-way communication would be possible from local people right up to the highest authorities. The DFID project intended to guarantee the rights of the traditional inhabitants of the park by issuing a limited number of permanent residence permits. |
| Unfortunately, this well designed structure was not successfully implemented at the end of the project for political reasons. The DSWR was originally designated as a ‘Wildlife Reserve’, which prohibits either human occupation or resource exploitation. The Sentarum Lakes have, however, long been fished, and there appear to be little prospects for evacuating the region's fishers. Even after extensive negotiations between the Ministries concerned, the status of the park has not yet been changed to the ‘Sustainable Development Reserve’ required for uptake of the DSWR plans. The management strategy developed by the DFID project could not therefore be legally implemented given the current policy incoherence surrounding DSWR. |
| The Brazilian, DFID-supported Lago Mamiraua Ecological Station (LMES) has developed a similar management strategy to the DSWR but looks to become more successful due to its better-established legal basis. The LMES was gazetted as a reserve in the central Amazon in 1990 (CNPq, WCI and UFPa, 1992). At 11,240km2, the reserve is the largest protected area of flooded forest in the world. Like the DSWR, the LMES has spatial and hierarchical aspects to its management structure. To support the participation of its ‘guardian’ fishermen, the reserve was established as an ‘ecological station’ instead of a fully restricted national park. In this reserve type, exploitation is permitted in some peripheral areas to sustain local communities, while other central areas remain wholly protected. The zonation of these two areas was developed by consultation with the local communities, based largely on their indigenous knowledge of the resource. The different outcomes at the DSWR and the LMES highlight the need for effective leadership, endorsement and legitimation of any community-based fisheries management by national governments (see Part 1). |
Since most whitefish species do not survive on the floodplains, and must reenter these waters from their main river survival habitats, flood control schemes such as the embankment at the PIRDP study site in Bangladesh (Section 2.3.2) may have a negative impact on fishery productivity (Section 3.4). Any measures which enhance the accessibility of impounded floodplains to migrant whitefish are then likely to increase their productivity. Opportunities exist here for the increased participation of fishermen on the management committees of such sluice gates, which are presently comprised exclusively of farmers and water resource managers. Similar approaches are already being successfully used by the Ford Foundation's Community-Based Fisheries Management Project in Bangladesh (Box 5).
| Box 5. Community-Based Fisheries Management Project, Bangladesh |
| The Community-Based Fisheries Management (CBFM) project was launched in 1993 to support government agencies and NGOs to promote the sustainable use of inland fisheries resources by the active participation of local communities (Rahman et al, 1996). The project is funded by the Ford Foundation, with assistance by ICLARM and CNRS for the coordination of relationships between the Bangladesh Department of Fisheries and four major NGOs: BRAC, Caritas, CNRS and Proshika. |
| Twenty eight waterbodies are managed by the project, including both rivers and beels (floodplain lakes). The partner NGOs work to develop and strengthen fishers' organisations and develop appropriate institutions for co-management and participation. Local people, often women, are recruited to collect data on the fisheries for discussion with local communities on options for management. An integrated systems view is taken on human community-fisheries resources relationships and all resource stakeholders are included in the management process. Habitat restoration is much used by the project to ensure the accessibility of migrant whitefish to all waterbodies in each region. |
| At one project site in Tangail district, managed by CNRS and Proshika, the project has enabled local people to excavate a link channel between Sinharagi Beel and the Dhaleswari River. The surveys undertaken by local people then showed that fishing effort more than doubled due to the enhancement in fish stocks, and total catches in the region increased six times, with the valuable major carp species being particularly enhanced. To consolidate these benefits, local people have now agreed to maintain a dry-season fish sanctuary in the middle of the beel and to restrict the catches of young fish fry in the early flood season. |
As illustrated in the preceding section, the physical characteristics of floodplain fisheries determine the relationships between individuals, communities, and government. Participatory management seeks to set a particular pattern of relationships among these three; giving greater voice to individuals (especially poor individuals) and communities in decisions on the management of the fishery. Clearly, the extent to which a participatory pattern of relationships can be set in place depends on the quality of the existing relationships between different individuals, between individuals and their community, between communities, and between communities and the state.
Managing fisheries is fundamentally about managing the people who exploit the fishery. It is about affecting the behaviour of the individuals and households which are responsible for setting the nets or using the dynamite. This is sometimes misunderstood in the fisheries management literature, which occasionally lapses into discussions of managing fish or managing communities. Fish are affected by management only in as much as the actions of individual fishers is modified by the governance of the fishery. The concept of community only becomes relevant after one recognises that this consists of individuals, who may or may not share a common sense of purpose and attitude towards the resource.
As described in Section 4, inland fisheries commonly include a wide range of different fishing gears. The different gears have impacts on different species, at different stages of the season, and in different locations. The multiplicity of gears and the interaction between them, can lead to tensions between individuals. In the case of an inland fishery in Southern Thailand, there is a clearly perceived conflict within a single community between the use of gill-nets and the use of fish traps (see Masae and McGregor, 1997). Trap fishermen have been lobbying government hard in an effort to increase restrictions on gill-net fishermen. They regard these gill-net fishermen as responsible for catching the pre-mature, valuable species, which their traps are designed for and this, they believe, significantly reduces their income. As this suggests, the extent to which these different individuals and households can have a common view on what represents an appropriate management regime is one of the first and fundamental challenges for participatory management in inland fisheries.
The accommodation of different individual and household interests in a management regime is further complicated by disparities of wealth and power between fishing households. As earlier research suggests, different types of fishing gear often require different levels of investment and their use reflects different levels of wealth and power (Heady, McGregor and Winnett 1995). In Bangladesh, the more wealthy fishing households use the most expensive fishing gears, such as brushpile traps. These households also hold the fishing licences, and are usually able to control access to the fishery in such a way as to assure that the returns to their gears are the most lucrative (Kremer 1994).
Creating a management system that can cope with substantial differences in the wealth and power of individual fishing households is a major challenge. The case of the Oxbow Lakes Project, reported in Box 2, is particularly interesting in this respect. In this case the management system is operated for the benefit of poorer fishing households. This involves the exclusion of non-poor fishing households from the Lake fishery. This has been achieved in this part of Bangladesh, however, only because the poor have been backed by a large and powerful non-governmental organisation (BRAC). BRAC has used its experience, its organisation and its skill in managing government, to ensure that the government honours its policy rhetoric of helping poor fishermen, by giving them preferential access to water-body licences. Such a supportive arrangement does not exist for all fisheries in Bangladesh. It is also vital to this project that the oxbow lakes are relatively small and closed.
As we can see then, individuals in inland fisheries can be differentiated in a number of different ways including: their gear type, their residential location, their location in the fishery, their wealth, and their knowledge of the fishery. These factors will lead them to relate differently both to the rules and regulations of government and to their communities.
The community is important because it is the context within which individuals and fishing households operate. The decisions of a household about how it will fish can be affected by considerations of what the community will permit. This involves individuals and households making judgements about the reactions of community leaders and other powerful figures within the community, as well as those of neighbours and relatives.
As the earlier section on settlement characteristics indicated, when we talk of community in inland fisheries this can mean individual neighbourhoods, a village, or groups of villages around a waterbody. Moreover, answering the question as to who is involved in inland fisheries may not be as simple as for coastal and marine fisheries. While villages may occasionally be organised exclusively as ‘fishing villages’, many inland fishing households will tend to live in communities alongside households involved in other rural occupations. This makes them more difficult to identify and the identification problem becomes more difficult still when fishing households are also involved in other activities, such as agriculture, for part of the year.
Assuming that it is possible to identify fishing households, an assessment of management must then consider their relationship to their wider community. The nature of community structure and strength of authority will determine the extent to which the community may be an effective institution in both controlling the actions of individual fishing households and as a conduit for participation.
As seen in the examples of Bangladesh and Indonesia, some communities have a social structure in which households are largely viewed as equals, while others may contain sharp divisions between those that are perceived as superior and those that are perceived as inferior. Some communities show little division between households, while others are fraught with conflicts between groups of households. Despite the example of the Lempuing fishery, inland fishing communities are seldom homogeneous. Differentiation may appear singly or in multiple dimensions, but an awareness of how they combine will be vital to understanding how the community works.
The social structure is closely related to the issue of the authority system in the community, by which we mean the relationship between the majority of the households and their leaders. Even where there are divisions between individuals, communities may have strong systems of leadership, where individual households will defer to the decisions of community leaders. In other communities, however, whether or not there are divisions, it may be that individual households pay little attention to the wishes of their leaders.
As the section on waterbody morphology suggests, inland fisheries can present a unique problem to management, in that they are often large and communications in them are poor. In this physical context it is especially difficult to manage a fishery without the active participation of either the majority of the people fishing it, or of the most powerful people in the fishing communities.
Different combinations of community structure and authority system, combine with the biological characteristics, to determine the extent to which we can expect that fishing households will be compliant with community based fisheries management systems. As indicated in Table 7.1, a community which is unified and has a strong system of authority is more likely to achieve compliance with its fishery rules. A community which is divided and has weak authority systems is less likely to be able to persuade all fishing households to comply with fishing regulations.
Table 7.1 Prospects for management compliance under different types of community structure and authority
| Authority | Structure | ||||
| Unified | Divided | ||||
| Strong | Good | Moderate | |||
| Weak | Moderate | Poor | |||
The observations on licensing and leasing systems highlight some of the major considerations of government standing in respect of its ability to promote participatory management in fisheries. The relationship between government and fishing households and government and fishing communities can be severely undermined if governments are inconsistent in their rulings on inland fisheries. This creates uncertainty in the minds of fishers and their communities and so they are less likely to behave in a co-operative manner towards government. Similarly, if there is a long history of failure by government to involve communities in management of fisheries, developing a co-operative relationship may require governments to prove their commitment to the new participatory style of management. This may be a long process, but is essential to the success of participatory management.
Relationships to government in inland fisheries are complicated by the fact that fishing households may have to relate not just to one, but to several levels of government. It is often the case that there will be both central and local government administrations involved in fisheries management. In addition to this, because of the physical characteristics of the fisheries, it may be that inland fisheries span a number of different local government jurisdictions, or even different countries for the largest rivers such as the Ganges/Padma and the Mekong. In research in South-east Asian fisheries, this complexity has been regarded as major obstacle to effective natural resource management (Masae, 1996).
Where the complexity becomes too great, fishing households may perceive government as being incapable of effectively managing the fishery. This effect can also be exacerbated by the presence of the highly migratory ‘whitefish’ species. In respect of these, fishing households may regard working with government in their physical location as irrelevant, if government in other localities is failing to protect the migratory species. This situation is illustrated in the case of the Thale Noi fishery in Southern Thailand (Box 6).
| Box 6. Difficulties with Management Coordination in the Fisheries of Southern Thailand |
| Thale Noi lake and the adjacent floodplain swamp of Phru Khuan Khreng are under the jurisdiction of three different Provincial governments and many more district authorities. In a recent village meeting to discuss the problems of the fishery, fishermen from different villages around the lake and in the swamp, fell into a round of sharp recrimination against each other. Fishermen in the lake community were castigated by the swamp fishermen for their overfishing and their encroachment of swamp fishing grounds: lake fishermen responded that the problems in the fishery were because of swamp fishermen fishing in the canal migration routes and in using small-scale mechanical excavators to dig trap-ponds and catch large amounts of fish during the dry season. What was apparent in the discussion was the inconsistency with which the different local governments were applying management regulations and the lack of co-ordination between the different local government authorities. In this situation, the fishermen are left simply to do the best for themselves, knowing that what they do not catch cannot be guaranteed to provide for the future well-being of the fishery. Despite a rhetoric of community-based natural resource management, the Thai government still has major structural problems which inhibit effective local management. Government at all levels also still has a long way to go in devolving its highly centralist and authoritative management tendencies. |
In Bangladesh, in the Oxbow Lakes Project and in the Community-Based Fisheries Management Project (Boxes 2 and 5), different solutions have been found to the problem of governance. Non-governmental organisations in Bangladesh are long established and some of them are very capable indeed. In both of these project areas, the NGOs are effectively substituting for government. While they each have some relationship with government fisheries services, they are to a greater or lesser degree performing the role which government might perform in the management of the fishery. This is possible because of the many years spent in building up trust between individuals, communities and the NGOs. This is not to suggest that there are no problems of governance in these fishery areas. The NGOs still have to contend with powerful local families who are resentful of the control which they are granting poorer fishing households over the fishery. However, in terms of effective management and in the promotion of participation in Bangladesh, the NGOs may offer a solution where government capacity is lacking.
This section has explored the ways in which the social and biological conditions in inland fisheries interact with each other to determine the potential of different management systems. A substantial list of obstacles exist in the path towards effective participatory management of inland fisheries. However, as summarised in the Part 1 Guidelines, it is possible to turn these cautions into a series of guide points for realistic consideration.
With respect to the morphology of the waterbodies to be managed, the two important factors to consider are the size of the waterbody and the extent to which it is (or can be) closed to the migrations of fish. The costs of management are likely to rise with the size of the waterbody. Obviously, monitoring compliance with management rules becomes more difficult where fishers are dispersed across a large area. Larger waterbodies are also likely to involve greater numbers of communities in the fishery and thus require some institutional arrangements for the co-ordination of management effort. An exception to this principle of greater size leading to greater management costs, is where there is a single or relatively few communities in large and isolated waterbodies.
The extent to which the waterbody is closed, simply determines the extent to which the resource (the fish) are viewed as under the control of the community or communities associated with the waterbody. Where fish can migrate from a waterbody to be caught elsewhere, then the incentives to manage the resource in a sustainable manner are weakened. The Pomeroy and Williams (1994) conditions for effective co-management allude to this point, but do not state it explicitly. They refer to both clearly defined boundaries for the fishery and clearly defined management unit membership, but do not refer to a clearly defined ‘resource pool’. Even with boundaries and membership, the mobility of the resource between boundaries and memberships of management systems means that there are problems of incentives for participatory management. There will always be costs associated with solving such problems. As the Community-Based Fisheries Management project in Bangladesh suggests, however, it is not impossible to solve those problems. Even where waterbodies are open, effective participatory management can show demonstrable returns to local management groups (Rahman et al 1996).
The human settlement pattern in inland fisheries is an important consideration for participatory management systems. The extent to which a community or group of fishing households have a sense of exclusive ‘ownership’ over the fishery, will be a key factor in whether they will be prepared to participate in its management. As discussed in this paper, many inland waterbodies will have several communities exploiting them and a condition for effective participatory management is that a working relationship among these communities can be constructed and maintained. A further complication which we have not discussed here is where the waterbody is exploited for purposes other than fish. It is not uncommon for inland waterbodies to be important for forestry, to be seasonal agricultural land, and to be an irrigation resource for agriculture. All of these other competing uses may also weaken a sense of ‘ownership’ over the resource and may reduce incentives for participation.
Once again, however, these problems are not insurmountable. The cases of fishermen as the guardians of national park resources in Indonesia and Brazil, suggest a model of participation worthy of further consideration. In this, the role of government in increasing the sense of waterbody stewardship, rather than ownership is vital.
Thirdly, fish mobility in inland fisheries represents an important consideration in the construction of participatory management arrangements. The multi-species character of many inland fisheries and the different migratory habits of different species are an important basis of differentiation amongst fishing households. Households will tend to own gears which will target particular species, at a particular point in their life-cycle, or at a particular location. In this sense, many inland fisheries are not a single fishery, but consist of many sub-fisheries. Given this the management requirements with respect to different species may be quite different and indeed, some of these requirements may clash with each other. As the case of Thale Noi in Thailand shows, what is good for trap-fishing households may not be good for gill-net fishing households. This differentiation between fishing households is compounded by inter-related differences in wealth and power. Thus, a single management strategy may not always be possible.
The answer to this problem lies in a more strategic approach to the governance of waterbodies, as described in the Part 1 Guidelines. This would entail a greater understanding of the social and biological composition of the fishery and a better understanding of the different types of management measures which might improve the overall resource. In this, there is an unavoidable role either for government or a substitute for government (i.e. large NGOs). Indigenous knowledge in fisheries is often detailed for specific localities, but is less well developed with respect to migration and wider life-cycles of species. Until recently, the science of inland, tropical fisheries has also been relatively under-developed. The research that is reported here, however, begins to offer a more detailed insight into management options in inland fisheries. The establishment of reserve areas which are targeted at improving the well-being of particular species; the careful targeting of gear and gear-location restrictions to protect species at a particular point in their reproductive and migratory cycle; and the improvement of migration pathways (as in the Community-Based Fisheries Management Project in Bangladesh) are all possible, more subtle management options. The prospects for implementing such tools using participatory approaches, depend strongly on the spatial characteristics of each floodplain system (Table 7.2).
As noted at the beginning of this section, participatory management in inland fisheries is fundamentally about governance. The establishment of effective and sustainable participatory management systems depends crucially on the legitimacy and effectiveness of government. Despite the negative tenor on government performance in fisheries management in this section, the interplay of social and biological aspects of these fisheries strongly suggests that participatory management will not be possible without effective government. Equally, as a wide range of observations on fisheries management suggest, it is not possible to manage fisheries without some degree of consent of the fishers (see Rettig et al 1989, Jentoft and McCay 1995). The alternative to consent for governments is coercion, yet experience argues that governments may tend to overestimate their capacity for coercion in inland fisheries. Not least the physical characteristics of the fisheries will tend to make the task of coercing compliance with management regimes a very costly exercise indeed. In such conditions participation may be seen as the only practical route for engendering consent for a fisheries management regime.
Table 7.2 The importance of spatial characteristics of inland fisheries for their prospects for participatory management
| Spatial Characteristics of Resource | Prospects for Participatory Management | |
| Higher | Lower | |
| Waterbody size | Small | Large |
| Extent of waterbody closure | Closed | Open |
| Villages using waterbody | Few | Many |
| Mobility of fish species | Low (Blackfish) | High (Whitefish) |
| Sense of resource ownership | Strong | Weak |
This view of participation could, of course, be dismissed as crudely instrumental, but the intention here is to offer a practical assessment of the situation. It is up to governments to decide how far their desire to develop participation can go. As noted at the outset, no responsible governments would be prepared to give up complete control over what may be a vital natural resource. As with the practical management measures, the way forward for participation in inland fisheries seems to lie in a more strategic assessment of the need for both government and individual/community participation. Guidelines for the determination of suitable participatory structures for different floodplain localities are clearly described in Part 1.
Different types of community-based fishery management regimes can be built on different degrees of participation of the fishers in the planning, implementation, monitoring and enforcement of the management scheme. Depending on the social and biological conditions in the fishery, the degree of participation can range from dictatorial management by government, with little local input, to self-management that involves local control over the fishery, with little government input. In between, there are a wide range of possibilities. The strength and quality of the existing set of relationships between individuals; between individuals and their communities; between communities in a single fishery; and between citizens and the state, all must be assessed to judge what types of participation might be possible.
In conclusion then, this paper argues that there is much to gain from more effective management of inland fisheries, against the current backdrop of competitive exploitation and often inconsistent government policy. It is recognised that significant difficulties do exist for collective social action, and that participatory community management should not be considered as a cheap or easy alternative to other strategies. Nevertheless, as shown in the various case studies and in the Part 1 Guidelines, the problems can be overcome and a realistic attitude towards participation may yet achieve positive results in many situations.
