More than just access to fish: The pros and cons of fisher participation in a customary marine tenure (Padu) system under pressure

Abstract

The Padu system of South Asia has received growing attention as an example of customary marine tenure that has survived despite rapid development and change throughout the region’s fisheries. This paper describes the Padu system as it functions at Pulicat lagoon, India, where it has enjoyed decades of legitimacy amongst its members, and has contributed to sustainable fishing. Recently, however, the Padu system has become unstable, driven by pressures of an expanding fishing population, reduced access to fishing grounds and a growing ‘shared poverty’. In spite of this, fisher loyalty to uphold the Padu system remains strong. This raises questions about the broader social, political and cultural meanings of Padu, which extend beyond access to a lucrative fishery. The paper highlights a trade-off between the benefits received through Padu membership at a societal level through collective action, and the individual costs of partaking in ‘shared poverty’, which is inherently distributed unequally amongst fishing families. The paper concludes with a discussion on the future of the Padu system in Pulicat, drawing from evolutionary pathways of other Padu systems in the region. It is suggested that, in the Pulicat case, the high social values attributed to the Padu system, alongside complex power structures, may hinder institutional adaptation.

Introduction

In fisheries, there is significant interest in the functioning of customary, or traditional, institutions, the ways in which they govern access to marine resources, and their potential contribution to sustainable resource use [1], [2], [3], [4]. Successful examples of customary marine tenure serve as convincing alternatives to Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons [5], and offer insight into the value of locally derived forms of governance, which can operate across regional scales [6], [7], [8]. Conversely, many studies highlight institutional vulnerability and, sometimes, complete collapse, often triggered by new governance interventions [9], [10] and broader processes of economic change, modernization and development [11], [12], [13]. The frequent erosion of people’s capacity to govern their own marine affairs has generated much theoretical and empirical work to understand the mechanisms of institutional robustness in the face of change, as well as the consequences for the natural resource and those people dependent on it [14], [15], [16], [17], [18], [19], [20], [21].

In this endeavor, McCay and Jentoft [2] advocate a ‘thick’ ethnographic perspective, which emphasizes the embeddedness of property rights within dynamic social and political relationships. They draw from a history of research in maritime anthropology, which has long argued for greater attention to social relations in fisheries, and the “cultural systems of meanings and values in the definition of access rights and claims” [2:25]. Steins and Edwards [18:539] call for a social constructionist approach to interpret motivations behind collective action in common-pool resource governance through greater focus on the external environment within which institutions operate, and the way that social actors “socially construct their everyday reality”. Along a similar vein, Ribot and Peluso’s [22:153] theory of access critiques property theory for conceptualizing access only in terms of property rights, and advocates a broader interpretation of access as the “ability to benefit from things”. The authors seek to facilitate analyses of “who actually benefits from things and through what processes they are able to do so”, bringing attention to a “wider range of social relationships that can constrain or enable people to benefit from resources without focusing on property relations alone”. This focus on capability and social and political process is much in line with the environmental entitlements literature [23], [24], which has broadened focus from institutional design, to address how institutions shape access to, and control over, resources, and what implications this has for different people within an institutional arrangement. As Jentoft [3:137] argues that “we need a broader concept of institutions…that includes the social and cultural underpinnings of management systems and one that captures the social processes and governance mechanisms that are essential to fisheries management in the broadest sense”.

This paper describes a customary marine tenure system in India known as Padu, in the context of current stresses, and the broader social and political framings, which influence people’s response and institutional adaptation. Whilst versions of Padu exist throughout much of South Asia, this article draws upon a case study in Pulicat lagoon, India’s second largest lagoon and home to approximately 30,000 artisanal fishers [25]. In Pulicat, the Padu system has been operational for many generations, and largely restricts fishing access to members of an elite fishing caste Pattinaver. By establishing access rights, the Padu system has been effective in reducing fisheries conflict between villages¹ and contributes to sustainable resource use in the lagoon by limiting fishing pressure [26], [27]. However, there is growing concern as to the Padu system’s continued survival. In recent years, the system has become unstable, driven by pressures of an expanding eligible fishing population, reduced access to fishing grounds, and a growing ‘shared poverty’. In spite of these pressures, fisher loyalty to uphold the Padu system remains strong. This necessarily draws attention to the broader social, political and cultural meanings of the Padu system, which extend far beyond the provision of access to fish.

The paper starts with a description of the Padu system and its current operation at Pulicat. The nature of population pressure is detailed, drawing from a period of ethnographic fieldwork in Pulicat lagoon between 2003 and 2004 and a series of subsequent visits between 2004 and 2009. The paper then discusses some of the broader social framings within which the Padu system is embedded. In particular, the paper highlights a trade-off between the benefits received through Padu membership, which are visible at a societal level through collective action, and the individual costs of partaking in ‘shared poverty’, which is inherently distributed unequally amongst fishing families. The paper concludes with a discussion on the future of the Padu system in Pulicat, drawing from evolutionary pathways of other Padu systems in the region. It is concluded that, in the Pulicat case, the high social values attributed to the Padu system, alongside complex power structures, may hinder institutional adaptation and response to negative feedback.