Conflicts over the imposition of restrictions in common-pool resources management institutions are expected to arise from variations in human values, perceptions of justice, and the disparate ...demographic scales of benefits and costs. We hypothesized and tested a series of propositions about how the demographic scale and context of common restrictions would influence coral reef fisheries of 4 African countries. We surveyed the preferences and perceived benefits of 1849 people in 89 fish landing sites for 6 common restrictions of increasing severity. Variability in perceived benefits within and between neighboring communities was evaluated to determine how perceptions changed with the severity of the proposed benefit/cost restriction scale, perceived benefits, disparities between beneficiaries, and national context. Within-community variability declined strongly (r² > 0.90) as perceived benefit increased but was either weak or not significantly associated with the neighbor-community’s variation. Within-community variation was less than between-community variation and differed by nation. There was generally broader scale agreement on the benefits of weaker restrictions of minimum sizes of fish and allowable fishing gear and more disagreement on stronger restrictions on species, time, and space use. Reduced variability was strongly associated with less perceived disparity in the benefits received by local versus government beneficiaries. These findings indicate potential conflicts between neighboring communities for most, but particularly the strongest, restrictions. Consequently, the broadscale management benefits of strong restrictions will need to address between-community compliance and justice procedures. Demographic variability requires coordinating governance and management to account for restriction-specific variability in the perceptions of management benefits.
Managing ecosystems for multiple ecosystem services and balancing the well-being of diverse stakeholders involves different kinds of trade-offs. Often trade-offs involve noneconomic and ...difficult-to-evaluate values, such as cultural identity, employment, the well-being of poor people, or particular species or ecosystem structures. Although trade-offs need to be considered for successful environmental management, they are often overlooked in favor of win-wins. Management and policy decisions demand approaches that can explicitly acknowledge and evaluate diverse trade-offs. We identified a diversity of apparent trade-offs in a small-scale tropical fishery when ecological simulations were integrated with participatory assessments of social–ecological system structure and stakeholders’ well-being. Despite an apparent win-win between conservation and profitability at the aggregate scale, food production, employment, and well-being of marginalized stakeholders were differentially influenced by management decisions leading to trade-offs. Some of these trade-offs were suggested to be “taboo” trade-offs between morally incommensurable values, such as between profits and the well-being of marginalized women. These were not previously recognized as management issues. Stakeholders explored and deliberated over trade-offs supported by an interactive “toy model” representing key system trade-offs, alongside qualitative narrative scenarios of the future. The concept of taboo trade-offs suggests that psychological bias and social sensitivity may exclude key issues from decision making, which can result in policies that are difficult to implement. Our participatory modeling and scenarios approach has the potential to increase awareness of such trade-offs, promote discussion of what is acceptable, and potentially identify and reduce obstacles to management compliance.
Significance Environmental management inevitably involves trade-offs among different objectives, values, and stakeholders. Most evaluations of such trade-offs involve monetary valuation or calculation of aggregate production of ecosystem services, which can mask individual winners and losers. We combine a participatory, modeling, and scenarios approach to identify social–ecological trade-offs in a tropical fishery and the implications on well-being of different stakeholders. Such trade-offs are often ignored because losers are marginalized or not represented by quantification, and because the nature of underlying values may result in socially “taboo” trade-offs that pit incommensurable values against one another. A participatory modeling and scenarios approach can increase awareness of such trade-offs, promote discussion of what is socially acceptable, and potentially identify and reduce obstacles to compliance.
Common‐pool governance principles are becoming increasingly important tools for natural resource management with communities and comanagement arrangements. Effectiveness of these principles depends ...on variability in agreements, trust, and adherence to institutional norms. We evaluated heterogeneity in governance principles by asking 449 people in 30 fishing communities in 4 East African countries to rate their effectiveness. The influences of individuals, their membership and role in stakeholder community groups, leadership, community, and country were tested. The membership and role of people were not the main influence on their perceptions of the effectiveness of governance principles. Therefore, drawing conclusions about the effectiveness of specific principles would be difficult to make independent of the individuals asked. More critical were individuals’ nationalities and their associations with the shared perceptions of a response‐group's effectiveness of each principle. Perceptions of effectiveness differed strongly by country, and respondents from poor nations (Madagascar and Mozambique) were more cohesiveness but had fewer and weaker between‐community conflict‐resolution mechanisms. Overall, group identity, group autonomy, decision‐making process, and conflict resolution principles were perceived to be most effective and likely to be enforced by repeated low‐cost intragroup activities. Graduated sanctions, cost–benefit sharing, and monitoring resource users, fisheries, and ecology were the least scaled principles and less affordable via local control. We suggest these 2 groups of principles form independently and, as economies develop and natural resources become limiting, sustainability increasingly depends on the later principles. Therefore, management effectiveness in resource‐limited situations depends on distributing power, skills, and costs beyond fishing communities to insure conservation needs are met.
Necesidades de la Conservación Expuestas por la Variabilidad de los Principios de Gobernanza de Recursos Comunes
Resumen
Los principios de gobernanza de recursos comunes se utilizan cada vez más como una herramienta importante para el manejo de recursos naturales en las comunidades y los arreglos de co‐manejo. La efectividad de estos principios depende de la variabilidad de los arreglos, la confianza y el apego a las normas institucionales. Para evaluar la heterogeneidad en los principios de gobernanza le pedimos a 449 personas en 30 comunidades pesqueras de cuatro países del este de África que calificaran la efectividad de los principios. Se evaluaron la influencia de los individuos, su afiliación y su papel dentro de los grupos de liderazgo, dentro de la comunidad de accionistas, dentro de la comunidad y dentro de los países. La afiliación y el papel de las personas no fueron la influencia principal sobre sus percepciones de la efectividad de los principios de gobernanza. Por lo tanto, llegar a conclusiones sobre la efectividad de los principios específicos sería complicado, independientemente de los individuos a los que se les pide la calificación. Fueron más relevantes la nacionalidad de los individuos y su asociación con las percepciones compartidas sobre la efectividad de un grupo de respuestas de cada principio. Las percepciones de efectividad difirieron fuertemente entre países, y las respuestas de las naciones pobres (Madagascar y Mozambique) fueron más cohesivas, pero tuvieron menos mecanismos de resolución de conflictos entre comunidades, además de ser más débiles. En general, se percibieron como más efectivos y con mayor probabilidad de ser impuestos por las actividades de bajo costo dentro de un grupo. Las sanciones graduadas, la partición de los costos de los beneficios y el monitoreo de los usuarios de los recursos, las pesquerías y la ecología fueron los principios que menos aparecieron en la escala de las calificaciones y también fueron las menos costeables para el control local. Sugerimos que estos dos grupos de principios se formen independientemente y, conforme se desarrollan las economías y los recursos naturales se vuelvan limitados, que la sustentabilidad dependa cada vez más de estos principios. Así, el manejo de la efectividad en situaciones de recursos limitados depende de la distribución del poder, las habilidades y los costos más allá de las comunidades pesqueras para asegurar que se cumpla con todas las necesidades de conservación.
摘要
公共资源管理原则正在逐渐成为社区和共同管理计划中的自然资源管理的重要工具。公共资源管理原则的有效性取决于共同认知、信任和对制度规范的遵守情况的差异。我们通过收集四个东非国家 30 个渔业社区中 449 人对这些管理原则有效性的评价, 对管理原则的异质性进行了评估。本研究分析了个体差异、个体在利益相关者社区团体中的成员关系和身份、领导地位、所在社区和国家对结果的影响。结果表明, 个体的成员关系和身份不是影响他们对管理原则有效性的看法的主要因素。因此, 得出的对于具体原则有效性的结论因人而异, 主要的影响因素是个体的国籍及其与响应群体对各项原则有效性看法的关系。不同国家的受访者对管理原则有效性的看法差异很大, 贫穷国家 (马达加斯加和莫桑比克) 的受访者更遵守这些原则, 但他们解决社区间冲突的机制也较少较弱。总体而言, 群体认同、群体自主性、决策过程和冲突解决原则被认为最有效, 且很有可能通过重复的低成本群体内部措施得以实施。分等级制裁、成本效益共享和对资源使用者、渔业及生态进行监测等原则受到的评价最低, 且通过地方控制难以负担得起。我们认为可以独立建立这两大类原则, 并且随着经济日益发展、自然资源日益稀缺, 可持续发展将越来越依赖于第二类原则。因此, 在资源有限的情况下, 管理有效性将取决于渔业社区以外的权力、技能和成本的分配, 来确保保护需求得到满足。【翻译: 胡怡思; 审校: 聂永刚】
Article impact statement: Perceptions of natural resource governance principles show strong variation, exposing two groups of collective action conservation needs.
Achieving high compliance with resource‐use management policies is a critical concern to achieving sustainability, particularly in poor countries. Willingness to comply may depend on the values and ...perceptions of benefits and legitimacy of the restrictions. Consequently, we interviewed and evaluated the perceptions of fishing restrictions among ~2100 marine fisheries stakeholders (resource users and managers) in 102 fishing villages in Kenya, Madagascar, Mozambique and Tanzania. We hypothesized that perceived benefits would decline and social inequity increase along a hypothesized gradient of increasing access restriction – ranging from minimum size of fish to fisheries closures. Managers did not recognize the hypothesized access restriction gradient, seeing most restrictions as beneficial, but with some nation‐specific distinctions. Village‐level responses of resource users varied by country, and overall perceived benefits of access restrictions increased with the wealth, education and membership in fishing organizations. In Kenya and Tanzania, some communities with views that differed greatly from managers were, in places, found near marine protected areas and they perceived more benefits accruing to the government than resource users for the strongest access restrictions. Madagascar and Mozambique fishing villages had low between‐community variability, and their responses did not reflect the hypothesized restriction gradient or strong social disparity, which may reflect limited practical experience with restrictions. These results suggest that countries with stronger central governments contained villages with more between‐community variability and perceived social disparity than weaker governments. We argue that transparent negotiations with stakeholders about the scales of costs and benefits should increase compliance with selected fisheries regulations.
Community-based management (CBM) could be an essential tool to prevent the depletion of marine resources in the Western Indian Ocean region. In Kenya, political pressure to strengthen local ...governance, has led to adoption of CBM as a way of reducing over-exploitation and managing the competing uses and impacts on the marine environment. Several communities in Kenya have embraced CBM and have set aside or closed previously fished areas to enhance recovery of fisheries and biodiversity. These community fisheries closures (locally called tengefu), despite being degraded, may recover to finfish abundances and biodiversity levels similar to established MPAs or above thresholds for maintaining some ecological services. Communities see their direct involvement and control of these tengefu as more likely to result in benefits flowing directly to them. Community closures are also important for articulating and resolving community values and strengthening their management capacity. Here, we describe the evolution of the tengefu movement in Kenya and combine information from focus group discussions, interviews, underwater surveys and boundary marking to evaluate the current status, opportunities and challenges facing these tengefu. We show that in some cases community closures suffer from slow and incomplete national and local legislative processes, challenges to compliance, and weak management.
Increasing the chances that resource users engage in and comply with management regulations is a continual problem for many conservation initiatives globally. This is particularly common when ...resource users perceive more personal costs than benefits from specific management actions. Analysis of interviews with managers and fishers from 22 landing sites along the coast of Kenya indicated how key stakeholders perceived the scale of benefits and costs from different management strategies. Potential underlying causes of divergent perceptions towards different management tools were evaluated, including marine protected areas, no-take fisheries closures, gear use, minimum size of fish caught and species restrictions. The analysis identified three distinct opinion groups: (1) a group of nine landing sites that scaled their preference for most management restrictions neutral to low, with exceptions for minimum sizes of captured fish and gear restrictions; (2) a group of eight landing sites that scaled their preference for the above and species restrictions and closed season higher, and were more neutral about closures and marine protected areas; and (3) a group containing four landing sites and the managers’ offices that rated their preference for the above and closed areas and marine protected areas as high. Logistic regression was used to examine whether these groups differed in wealth, education, age, perceptions of disparity in benefits, dependence on fishing and distance to government marine protected areas. The most frequent significant factor was the resource users’ perceived disparity between the benefits of the management to themselves and their communities, with the benefits to the government. Consequently, efforts to reduce this real or perceived disparity are likely to increase adoption and compliance rates. Most widespread positively-viewed restrictions, such as gear use and minimum size of fish, should be promoted at the national level while other restrictions may be more appropriately implemented at the community level.
Common-pool resources are challenged by a number of factors including broadly acceptable resource extraction restrictions and effective implementation of proposed restrictions. Consequently, we ...evaluated fisher's perceptions of effectiveness of their governance institutions and benefits of restrictions in 16 East African marine fishing communities. At this site level the mean perceived effectiveness of 10 governance institutions and benefits of six restrictions were positively related (r2 = 0.57, p < 0.0007). However, this relationship masked governance-restriction dimensions that differentiated communities that perceive benefits of closures, protected areas, and species selection versus those preferring gear, minimum sizes of fish at capture, and closed season restrictions. The first “pro-conservation group” was distinguished by their higher scaling of the effectiveness of monitoring of resources and users, graduated sanctions, group identity, and decision-making. Consequently, stronger support for traditional area-and species-based conservation may require strengthening these institutions whereas traditional fisheries restrictions should find more support where these institutions are weaker. A climate refugia center that was a high priority for spatial management had strong support for closure restrictions in some sites but weak effectiveness of monitoring of resource users and ecology more broadly, which will need to be strengthened to insure successful area-based management.
•Perceptions of governance effectiveness and fisheries restrictions were studied.•Area and species conservation were most influenced by the strength of monitoring.•Weak monitoring was associated with more support for fisheries restrictions.•High heterogeneity of governance effectiveness found in the climate refugia•Monitoring resources and users recommended to increase support for conservation.
Introduction: The state of natural resources is greatly influenced by market access. Consequently, resource trader's incentives, decisions, and willingness to comply with management can influence ...efforts to achieve sustainability. Trader's impacts will depend on their economic niches, which are influenced by cultural norms, skill, social relationships, profitability, and the spatial scale of markets. Consequently, we examined the potential of traders to influence fisheries' sustainability by evaluating their jobs, gender roles, religion, socioeconomic status, association and perceptions of management systems, and future plans. We studied 142 traders in 19 Kenyan coral reef fisheries landing sites distributed among four gear management systems.
Outcomes: We found a strong role of gender, geography, and religion in the participation of these fisheries that was primarily driven by fisheries' profitability. The associations suggest that overfished fisheries should retain traders with low education, capital, and savings - often women; whereas sustainable stocks favor the opposite characteristics, and often men.
Conclusions: Therefore, managing for increasing yields, profits, and sustainability could exclude women traders unless they successfully access or adopt the more traditional male economic niche. Gender coexistence is most likely to be achieved by managing for intermediate resource levels where net production, catch, and fish body size diversity are high. Further, reducing risk and increasing the capital and mobility of women traders should reduce their chances of exclusion when fisheries are sustainable.
As sustainability scientists increasingly put forward the relevance of process‐relational approaches to make sense of social‐ecological phenomena, an inquiry on which methods would fit a ...process‐relational approach is necessary.
This paper discusses how a process‐relational approach can be applied to traditional qualitative research methods, namely interviews and coding and the tensions associated with it.
Process‐relational perspectives share commonalities with interpretative approaches but also present specific characteristics, such as the importance of material aspects and the understanding of the phenomenon as a moment in which different elements become defined respective to each other.
The paper uses data and researchers' experiences from an action research project seeking to support collective action among coastal communities affected by environmental changes in Kenya and Mozambique.
Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.
Resumo
À medida que os cientistas da sustentabilidade defendem cada vez mais a relevância das abordagens processo‐relacionais para compreender fenômenos socioecológicos, torna‐se necessário investigar quais métodos seriam adequados para uma abordagem processual‐relacional.
Este artigo discute como uma abordagem relacional‐processual pode ser aplicada aos métodos tradicionais de pesquisa qualitativa, nomeadamente entrevistas e codificação, e as tensões associadas a eles.
As perspectivas de processo‐relacionais partilham similaridades com abordagens interpretativas, mas também apresentam características específicas, como a importância dos aspectos materiais e a compreensão do fenômeno como um momento no qual diferentes elementos se definem em relação uns aos outros.
O artigo utiliza dados e experiências de pesquisadores de um projeto de investigação‐ação que busca apoiar a ação coletiva entre comunidades costeiras afetadas por mudanças ambientais no Quênia e em Moçambique.
Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.
The coral reefs of Tanga, Tanzania were recognized as a national conservation priority in the early 1970s, but the lack of a management response led to damage by dynamite, beach seines, and high ...numbers of fishers until the mid 1990s. Subsequently, an Irish Aid funded IUCN Eastern Africa program operated from 1994 to mid 2007 to implement increased management aimed at reducing these impacts. The main effects of this management were to establish collaborative management areas, reduce dynamite and seine net fishing, and establish small community fisheries closures beginning in 1996. The ecology of the coral reefs was studied just prior to the initiation of this management in 1996, during, 2004, and a few years after the project ended in 2010. The perceptions of resource users towards management options were evaluated in 2010. The ecological studies indicated that the biomass of fish rose continuously during this period from 260 to 770 kg/ha but the small closures were no different from the non-closure areas. The benthic community studies indicate stability in the coral cover and community composition and an increase in coralline algae and topographic complexity over time. The lack of change in the coral community suggests resilience to various disturbances including fisheries management and the warm temperature anomaly of 1998. These results indicate that some aspects of the management program had been ecologically successful even after the donor program ended. Moreover, the increased compliance with seine net use and dynamite restrictions were the most likely factors causing this increase in fish biomass and not the closures. Resource users interviewed in 2010 were supportive of gear restrictions but there was considerable between-community disagreement over the value of specific restrictions. The social-ecological results suggest that increased compliance with gear restrictions is largely responsible for the improvements in reef ecology and is a high priority for future management programs.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
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