Elsevier

Marine Policy

Volume 36, Issue 1, January 2012, Pages 278-285
Marine Policy

Institutional designs of customary fisheries management arrangements in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, and Mexico

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpol.2011.06.005Get rights and content

Abstract

There are considerable efforts by governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and academia to integrate marine conservation initiatives and customary practices, such as taboos that limit resource use. However, these efforts are often pursued without a fundamental understanding of customary institutions. This paper examines the operational rules in use and the presence of institutional design principles in long-enduring and dynamic customary fisheries management institutions in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, and Mexico. Rather than a “blue print” for devising long-enduring institutions, this study relies on the design principles as a starting point to organize an inquiry into the institutional diversity found in customary governance regimes. Three important trends emerged from this comparative analysis: (1) despite it being notoriously difficult to define boundaries around marine resources, almost 3/4 of the cases in this study had clearly defined boundaries and membership; (2) all of the customary institutions were able to make and change rules, indicating a critical degree of flexibility and autonomy that may be necessary for adaptive management; (3) the customary institutions examined generally lacked key interactions with organizations operating at larger scales, suggesting that they may lack the institutional embeddedness required to confront some common pool resources (CPR) challenges from the broader socioeconomic, institutional and political settings in which they are embedded. Future research will be necessary to better understand how specific institutional designs are related to social and ecological outcomes in commons property institutions.

Highlights

► Explores the institutional diversity found in 15 customary governance regimes. ► This study doubled the number of existing cases that have examined design principles in fisheries. ► Most design principles were consistently present across the study sites. ► But institutions lacked key interactions with organizations operating at larger scales.

Introduction

Throughout the world, common-pool resources (CPR) such as fisheries and forests are being overexploited. CPRs include resources such as coastal fisheries that feature the properties of substractability and excludability. Subtractability refers to situations when harvesting of a resource (e.g., fish) by one person reduces the amount left for others. Excludability refers to the difficulty or high costs associated with excluding other individuals from the benefit stream originated by the resource. Because of these defining characteristics, overexploitation and degradation of CPRs are common.

In many instances, overexploitation of CPRs is viewed as a governance failure. Consequently, increased attention is being paid to understanding the institutions used to manage CPRs. Early studies suggested that unless CPRs were under private or state regimes, resources would be fated to overexploitation (see e.g., [1]). However, research in many field settings across the world has showed that under community-based management regimes users were also capable of devising effective governance rules to prevent overuse [2], [3], [4], [5]. In tropical developing nations, community-based management of marine resources has become an increasingly popular paradigm that is based on the notion that local actors are better placed to devise rules to overcome tragedies of the commons [6]. It is clear that community-based management is not a panacea, and significant empirical research is still needed to better understand when it can lead to “improved governance” outcomes and when it might not [7].

In contributing to this empirical inquiry, the concept of institutional “design principles” [3] might provide a useful point of departure for comparative studies. The design principles are broadly construed conditions that can increase the likelihood of sustaining collective action over time, and were derived from the study of well-documented cases of long-enduring CPR regimes [3]. These conditions can, but not necessarily will, provide credible commitments that resource users will maintain and invest in their institutions over time. The influence of institutional designs on sustainable governance outcomes are likely affected by configurational interactions with scale dependent factors (see [32]). The so called design principles as defined by Ostrom include: (1) clearly defined boundaries i.e. geographic or institutional such as membership rights; (2) the development and enforcement of rules that limit resource use; (3) congruence between rules and local conditions (i.e. scale and appropriateness); (4) resource users have rights to make, enforce, and change the rules; (5) individuals affected by the rules can participate in changing the rules; (6) resources are monitored; (7) the presence of accountability mechanisms for those monitoring compliance with the rules; (8) sanctions that increase with repeat offenses and in congruence to the severity of such offenses (graduated sanctions); (9) the presence of arenas for discussion and agreement such as conflict resolution; and (10) the degree to which they are nested within other institutions [3], [8].

Despite being supported by a large number of empirical studies [9], there is concern that these design principles may not be applicable to a wide range of real life situations or that they may be specific only to certain types of CPRs (see e.g., [10], [11]). Rather than a “blue print” for devising long-enduring institutions, this study relies on the design principles as a starting point to organize inquiry to describe the institutional diversity found in customary governance regimes [12]. Customary management refers to local norms and practices that regulate the use, access, and transfer of resources [12]. This study is particularly concerned with documenting and examining rules or norms that are generally not formally codified in writing (e.g., laws, statutes, provisions), but that nevertheless, structure action situations. These informal norms are referred to as rules-in-use. Articulating informal institutions as rules-in-use and documenting them across cases, allows scholars to start working towards building a diagnostic approach to community-based governance analysis [13]. Eventually, such diagnostic approaches could help to identify weaknesses/vulnerabilities of community-based management facing demographic changes, technological development, and market integration, among other factors [8].

In this paper, the design principles approach is employed to examine the diversity of customary fisheries management institutions in three well-studied contexts: North Sumatra, Indonesia, New Ireland and Manus Provinces, Papua New Guinea (PNG), and the Northern Gulf of California, Mexico. Main topics of exploration include: (1) the types of operational-level rules employed in the different customary management institutions; (2) whether these customary institutions have key institutional design principles; and (3) the types of linkages institutional entrepreneurs possess at different scales (i.e. cross-scale linkages). This study has important implications for the institutional analyses of contemporary community-based management that draws on elements of customary governance.

Section snippets

North Sumatra, Indonesia

Eleven communities were surveyed in the northernmost reaches of Sumatra (the islands of Weh and Aceh) where communities employ a customary management system called Panglima Laot, which literally translates to “Commander of the Sea”. Panglima Laot refers to both the system of management and the individual leader who is in charge of developing the rules and regulation appropriate for each fishing ground. The system is formally recognized by the Aceh Provincial Government, which means that the

Methods

Socioeconomic studies were conducted in 20 villages across Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, and Mexico as part of ongoing research collaborations with local communities between 2000 and 2010. To examine and document rules-in-use that had not formally been codified in writing, we used a purposive case selection strategy to choose cases of fishing communities with a long place-based history, for which there was first hand access to primary data. This resulted in a total of 15 different reef/fisheries

Operational rules

Customary institutions used a range of operational rules to limit use of marine resources. The diversity of operational rules could be typified as governing the spatial extent of harvesting activities (i.e. gear), temporality, and customary marine tenure (Table 3). Based on this classification, the least used restriction among the cases analyzed was spatial, while gear, and temporal restrictions on harvesting (i.e. closed areas) were very common.

Five of the Panglima Laot systems only restricted

Operational rules

This study found considerable diversity of rules and the presence of a number of the design principles hypothesized to be important for long-enduring natural resources governance institutions. In terms of operational rules, the most common in the study sites was no fishing on Friday, (the Muslim Sabbath). This was obviously influenced by the disproportional number of Indonesian study sites. After temporal restrictions, sites with gear restrictions and surveillance were found most often in the

Acknowledgments

This research was funded by the Australian Research Council, the National Geographic Society (Grant no. 8506-08) and the Christensen Fund. Thanks to K. Holmes for constructive comments on an earlier version of the manuscript and to the communities that participated in this study.

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