The evolution of a floodplain aquaculture management system in Bangladesh

A collective floodplain aquaculture (FPA) management approach, developed in the Daudkandi sub-district of Bangladesh, has become popular among local landowners of floodplains for managing aquacultural operation in their lands. Taking inspiration from a small-scale FPA formed by landowners, an NGO modernized the approach when it collaborated with the community in applying the management approach in a larger floodplain in 1996. Since then, the success of the early FPA resulted in proliferation of more NGO-collaborated FPAs and independently-formed FPAs. In this paper, we try to find how this management system has evolved over time in both types of FPAs. By studying 15 FPAs selected from five districts, we tried to identify the modifications in organizational and operational aspects of these FPAs. In the Daudkandi region, we observed that, as the realization of profitability increased among the landowners, they not only formed new FPAs by themselves but also, in some FPAs, tried to confine the rising benefits among themselves by excluding non-landowners’ participants. We also found the emergence of professional aquacultural managers who manage the aquacultural operation of an FPA by leasing it from FPA’s management committee. We conclude that, in the Daudkandi sub-district, the FPAs evolved along the way as users adaptively responded to the problem of lower profits by innovating lease-based management. In other parts of the country, where the FPA trend is relatively new and the FPA management committees were found to be still running the aquacultural operation instead of leasing it, the direction of the evolution should be carefully examined in the context of the community resource management.