As Nearshore Stocks Drop, Malawi Begins a Return to Local Fisheries Management

Advances in understanding the evolution of institutions in complex social-ecological systems

“…The rediscovery of community-based management led many countries to introduce decentralization reforms to enhance the legal rights of local communities with respect to the use and management of resources [17][18][19]. These reforms, however, often failed to translate into meaningful change in the structure or performance of environmental governance systems as different path-dependent processes served to undermine the role of communities in resource management.…”

Challenges to sustainable management of the lakes of Malawi

“…Fisheries policy and governance systems, including the technical measures and regulations reviewed above, have largely failed to prevent the over-exploitation and subsequent collapse of the valuable chambo fishery, or to increase fish production from Malawi lakes (Banda et al, 2005;Dobson and Lynch, 2003;Hara, 2006;Sarch and Allison, 2000). The main reasons for these failures include: (i) lack of compliance with fishing regulations, (ii) limited user participation in formulation of regulations and management of fisheries, and (iii) topdown control of fisheries governance, where fisheries objectives in comanagement arrangements are still largely set by government officials (Njaya, 2007;Hara et al, 2002).…”

Into the deep blue sea: Commons theory and international governance of Atlantic Bluefin Tuna

“…Most attempts to shift from an open-access regime to a regulated fishery rely upon statebased command-and-control and scientific management techniques that devise harvesting rules in line with conventional notions of maximum sustainable yield. While this approach has often been criticized for failing to resolve fundamental issues related to overharvesting (Ostrom 1990;Dobson and Lynch 2003) and the regeneration of biological populations (Acheson and Wilson 1996;Holling and Meffe 1996), it is not clear that the participatory approaches that characterize the governance of common-pool resources (CPR) at local levels offer a viable alternative. CPR theory is best developed at the level of the individual where it can draw upon formal models of collective action and experimental methods to inform our understanding of the factors that influence choice .…”