Exploring Social Resilience in Madagascar's Marine Protected Areas

Abstract

We examined and compared aspects of local-level resilience in 13 coastal communities within and adjacent to all of Madagascar's national marine protected areas. Our examination of social resilience focused on indicators of the flexibility of household livelihood portfolios and both formal and informal governance institutions, the capacity of communities to organize, their capacity to learn, and access to household assets and community infrastructure. In general, we found high levels of flexibility in formal institutions and livelihood portfolios and high levels of participation in decision-making and community groups. Together, these indicators suggest some latent capacity to adaptively manage resources, but this capacity may be offset by poor levels of trust between communities and resource managers, a poor understanding of the ways in which humans affect marine resources, inadequate feedback of ecological monitoring to communities, inflexibility in informal governance institutions, and a lack of assets to draw upon. We suggest that building desirable resilience in Madagascar's marine protected areas will require the following: investments in community-level infrastructure, projects to generate household income, and enhanced agricultural production to improve the well-being of communities; improvements in the capacity to learn through investments in formal and informal education; enhanced trust between park staff and local communities; empowerment of communities to govern and enforce natural resources; the increased accountability of leaders and transparency of governance processes; adequate cross-scale interaction with local, provincial, and national institutions; and the pursuit of these activities in ways that capitalize on community-specific strengths, such as high flexibility and the presence of sociocultural institutions such as taboos that regulate resource use.

case study from the southern Cape linefishery 2: Considering one’s options when the fish leave

“…Response strategies to these changes, broadly classified as either reacting, coping or adapting (see supplementary material for a definition of concepts used in this paper), are also influenced by actions at multiple scales. [10][11][12] Fishing as a livelihood is complex and dynamic, and concerns not only individuals but also households or groups attempting to make a living to meet various nutritional and economic needs. 13,14 The livelihood perspective can be used to analyse poverty, vulnerability and marginalisation at the geographical scale of experience.…”

“…12,18 The resilience displayed by a system can be both a positive and negative attribute -whilst resilience in the system will ensure continued existence of the social units as they absorb multiple perturbations, systems that are too resilient may continue to cope and mitigate and resist adapting over the long term, even though long-term adaptation would result in a more desirable state of the system. 11 It is important to discern amongst social adaptations that serve to weaken long-term social-ecological resilience (amplifying responses that result in, for example, acceleration of resource depletion) and adaptations that result in increasing social-ecological resilience in the longer term (dampening responses that result in, for example, a decrease in resource depletion). 21 The recognition of whether and how social, economic or contextual circumstances may enable different responses is expected to provide insights into discerning which strategies can be adopted in line with conservation and/or development objectives.…”

From measuring outcomes to providing inputs: Governance, management, and local development for more effective marine protected areas

“…Policies that support effective management and natural-resource dependent livelihoods include clear rules of access and territorial rights, recognition of title/tenure, laws to support enforcement, legal mechanisms to support and guarantee meaningful participation in design and implementation, and clarity of MPA objectives [11,40,54,55,116,[118][119][120][121]. Congruence is also required between formal regulations, informal rules, and customary norms and practice [120], facilitated by policies that support the incorporation of local management systems and rules into MPA management and regulations [122,123]. Local norms that support conservation and restraint in resource harvesting may provide the most valuable platform for the sustainable management of common pool resources such as MPAs [120,124,125].…”

“…Lastly, levels of social capital -a term which refers to trustful, cooperative and reciprocal relationships within and between groups [130] -may be an important indicator of the quality of collaborative interactions [120]. Various authors, for example, emphasize the importance of having forums and networking opportunities for creating trust, building relationships, facilitating communication and colearning, and creating greater awareness and knowledge amongst partners [116,122,131,132]. Social capital is also facilitated by development of shared norms and understandings through effective information sharing between the regional and local level, which requires institutional capacity and consistent and varied forms of engagement between community groups, NGOs, and various levels of government [133].…”

“…Collectives of regional and international NGOs can be effective at supporting both conservation and development as partnerships can result in increased coordination of on-the-ground actions [127]. Linkages to decision-making bodies at local, regional, and national levels influence a community's ability to adapt to change and to self organize for management or development purposes [122]. Having links with an outside organization that plays an "honest broker", such as an NGO or university, may also help in mediating differences between and within communities [129].…”