4. PRESENT EXTENT OF FISHERIES SECTOR INCLUSION IN PRSPS AND NDPS

The expectation that PRSPs provide a more comprehensive and integrated approach to development planning does not negate the opportunity for specific sectors - like fisheries - to advance their own partisan interests in the problem identification and policy formulation discourse preceding the adoption of a PRSP, but it does ensure that such agendas are "nested", as opposed to stated separately, in the resulting documents.

Unfortunately, the World Bank's suggestive 1 070-page PRSP Sourcebook only makes a few isolated references, with the exception of the environmental section (2.5), to the fisheries sector - or fisheries examples (Table 4.1). While this is perhaps attributable to the Bank's own strategy for fisheries development now being over a decade old (Loayza et al., 1992), it is nevertheless all the more surprising given the potential of the sector, as we have already indicated, as; a motor of export growth, a substantive supplier of animal protein to the national market, and a recognized harbour of poverty (see allusions to this latter point too in the Bank's PRSP Sourcebook Volume I: Sections 1.1, 2.5 and Volume II: Section 2.2 - noted in the Table below) across parts of the developing world. The oversight is particularly palpable with regard to possibly the key section of the Sourcebook - Public Spending for Poverty Reduction - which provides "guidance on getting started on key issues in the context of preparing a poverty reduction strategy" (2001:2). Step 3.1 (Determining the Rationale for Public Intervention) for example, notes that poverty mapping can "cast substantial light" on inequities in access and the "existence of spatial poverty traps" (2001:21, 22) - exactly the sort of analysis being deployed by Pittaluga and the SFLP to such great effect in Sub-Saharan African fishing communities (2004, 2004a, 2004b). If indeed, "good poverty diagnostics - both quantitative and qualitative - are essential" to generate significant improvements in resource management and general all-round public sector performance (2001:2), then a strong case can be made for the inclusion of such materials as examples of illustrative "best practice".

Table 4.1 Occurrence of "fisheries" in PRSP sourcebook

The first priority perhaps then in "convincing governments and international agencies to include fisheries and aquaculture in rural development and poverty reduction strategies" (see TOR) is to ensure that the sector is more fully incorporated into support materials - like the PRSP Sourcebook - which provide guidance both on the "process" aspects of building a poverty reduction strategy, and on the practical aspects such as poverty diagnostics, specific sectoral challenges with respect to poverty reduction objectives, etc.

That said, materials such as the Sourcebook are only instructive - as opposed to prescriptive - and, ultimately, the extent to which the fisheries sector (or indeed, any sector) is nested in PRSPs or national development strategies will depend upon the economic, socio-political, structural and cultural contexts relating to specific national environments. In Section 3.C. of this report we identified elements we suggest will contribute to the ex-ante likelihood of the sector's incorporation into the national development agenda, and here we turn our attention to examining the extent of such incorporation through an ex-post analysis of national PRSPS and development plans ("Has the sector been incorporated? - and, if so, to what extent?"). The following sub-section therefore proposes a methodology for assessing the extent to which fisheries has been incorporated in published country assistance strategies, poverty reduction strategies and/or NDPs based upon work by Ekbom and Bojö (1997), Shyamsundar and Hamilton (2000), Shyamsundar et al. (2001), and Bojö and Reddy (2002), and Oksanen and Mersmann (2002) which examined environmental and forestry inclusion respectively. The subsequent sub-section applies this methodology to assess the degree to which countries and donors (in the form of the World Bank and European Union) in each of the identified sub-regions have embraced the sector in formulating national development agendas and donor support programmes. The concluding sub-section compares predicted ex-ante likelihood of inclusion with revealed ex-post evidence of incorporation, serving to highlight those economies where the import of the sector has evidently been recognized in ensuing discourses and emergent plans, and those countries which are presently "punching below their weight" in this regard.