The potential advantages of co-management include:
1. A more transparent, accountable and autonomous management system.
2. A more democratic and participatory system.
3. More economical than centralized management systems; requiring less to be spent on management administration and enforcement, in the long run.
4. Through involvement in management, fishers take responsibility for a number of managerial functions.
5. Makes maximum use of indigenous knowledge and expertise to provide information on the resource base and to complement scientific information for management.
Community-based Co-management 19
6. Improved stewardship of aquatic and coastal resources and management.
7. Management is accountable to local areas. Fishing communities are able to devise and administer management plans and regulatory measures that are more appropriate to local conditions. (Localized solutions to local problems.) 8. By giving the fishers a sense of ownership over the resource, co-manage- ment provides a powerful incentive for them to view the resource as a long- term asset rather than to discount its future returns.
9. Various interests and stakeholders are brought together to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the resource.
10. Since the community is involved in the formulation and implementation of co-management measures, a higher degree of acceptability, legitimacy and compliance to plans and regulations can be expected.
11. Community members can enforce standards of behaviour more effectively than bureaucracies can.
12. Increased communication and understanding among all concerned can minimize social conflict and maintain or improve social cohesion in the com- munity.
Despite all these advantages, co-management has several disadvantages and problems, including:
1. It may not be suitable for every fishing community. Many communities may not be willing or able to take on the responsibility of co-management.
2. Leadership and appropriate local institutions, such as fisher organizations, may not exist within the community to initiate or sustain co-management efforts.
3. In the short-run, there are high initial investments of time, financial resources and human resources to establish co-management.
4. For many individuals and communities, the incentive(s) – economic, social and/or political – to engage in co-management may not be present.
5. The risks involved in changing fisheries management strategies may be too high for some communities and fishers.
6. The costs for individuals to participate in co-management strategies (time, money) may outweigh the expected benefits.
7. Sufficient political will may not exist to support co-management.
8. Unease of political leaders and government officials to share power.
9. The community may not have the capacity to be an effective and equitable governing institution.
10. Actions by user groups outside the immediate community may undermine or destroy the management activities undertaken by the community.
11. Particular local resource characteristics, such as fish migratory patterns, may make it difficult or impossible for the community to manage the resource.
12. The need to develop a consensus from a wide range of interests may lengthen the decision-making process and result in weaker, compromised measures.
13. There may be shifts in ‘power bases’ (political, economic, social) that are not in the best interests of all partners.
14. There are those who feel that co-management is too costly and time consuming and that other alternatives, such as stricter regulations, may be better.
15. There is always a possibility of unbalanced and inequitable sharing of power between government and communities and the use of co-management by some political leaders solely for their own purposes.
Community-based Co-management 21
22
As stated earlier, the purpose of this handbook is to provide a practical reference on a process for community-based co-management for use by the initiators and facilitators of co-management. There is no blueprint or right process for community-based co-management. As already stated, there are a variety of different processes which can be tailored to meet a site-specific situation and context. In some cases there may already be a fisher organization capable of engaging in co-management, while in another there will be a need to organize fishers. In another case, an informal or customary fisheries management system may be functioning well in the community and the need
What is a Process for Community-based
Co-management?
3
© International Development Research Centre 2006. Fishery Co-management:
A Practical Handbook(R.S. Pomeroy and R. Rivera-Guieb)
IDRC, M. Verde.
is to reach a co-management agreement with government to provide support.
In another, fishers may only now be discussing informally among themselves the need to engage in some form of collective action.
This handbook will present a process of community-based co- management, not the process of community-based co-management. The process to be presented in this handbook can be thought of as a generic process that can serve as a reference to those who want to initiate a community-based co-management programme. Start at the beginning or start in the middle depending upon the situation. The process presented is based on the authors’ experience with community-based coastal resources management and co-management and on the experience of NGOs, development projects, governments and other institutions around the world. It takes lessons learned from successes and failures and provides a process to adopt, adapt or revise to the local situation and context. The activities presented in the process are present in some form in all the cases that the authors are familiar with.
Community-based co-management can be initiated in several ways. The process presented in this handbook is a community-level and community- initiated programme of community-based co-management that is implemented in partnership with an external agent (such as an NGO or academic or research institution) and government. Alternatively, it may be an externally initiated programme where the external agent or government agency identifies a problem (or problems), then establishes a programme in collaboration with the community. In another case, it may be initiated as part of a larger donor- assisted development programme, where there is little early consultation with the community. Co-management could also be initiated by the government fisheries department working with fishers to establish a national level fisheries advisory body to guide policy.
The ways in which the fishers approach the community-based co- management programme will depend, in part, on how the programme is initiated and their sense of ownership over the process. While the origin and initiation of the community-based co-management programme may differ (beginning or pre-implementation phase), it is the authors’ experience that the implementation phase activities in the process presented in this handbook are usually present.
This chapter of the handbook will provide an overview of the phases, components and activities of the process. Much more detail of each will be provided later in the handbook.