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

Abstract

a b s t r a c tThere 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.

Impacts of Climate Variability on Latin American Small-scale Fisheries

“…However, local institutions generally lack cross-scale linkages with higher governance levels (Cinner et al 2012b), suggesting that formal cross-scale governance recognition and support through the institutionalization of fishery rights is still needed in Latin American SSFs (Defeo andCastilla 2005, Chakalall et al 2007). This is of the utmost importance in highly valued transboundary resources, e.g., spiny lobsters, which require regional institutional arrangements to be properly managed in Latin America.…”

Overfishing Drivers and Opportunities for Recovery in Small-Scale Fisheries of the Midriff Islands Region, Gulf of California, Mexico: the Roles of Land and Sea Institutions in Fisheries Sustainability

“…Orensanz et al (2005) compared three management regimes of benthic small-scale fisheries in South America and suggested management prescriptions such as the promotion of systems that provide long-term use rights; the promotion of participation of fishers and other stakeholders, managers, and scientists in joint discussions of management issues; and capitalizing on fishers' knowledge. Cinner et al (2012) studied the occurrence of Ostrom's design principles in 20 long-enduring and dynamic small-scale fisheries systems in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, and Mexico and highlighted three trends: most cases had clearly defined resource boundaries and membership, all cases had flexibility and autonomy in making and changing rules, and most cases lacked cross-scale linkages with higher levels of governance, suggesting that they may lack the institutional embeddedness required to confront some common pool resource challenges (Cinner et al 2012). Orensanz et al (2013) studied the performance of 20 management regimes of benthic small-scale http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol19/iss1/art15/ fisheries in Latin America and suggested as the most salient lessons "the need to attend to the multiple aspects of sustainability (biological, social, economical, institutional) when a system is implemented, providing for flexibility and adaptiveness, creating ambits for interaction among stakeholders, and counting on transparent and effective support from the state regarding enforcement, legislation and courts.…”

Community-Based Conservation and Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Implications for Social-Ecological Resilience

“…Generally speaking, the publications reviewed considered self-regulated initiatives resilient to a given (set of) perturbation(s) when such initiatives held some of the following traits related to traditional ecological knowledge: (1) they maintain a decision-making system, based on local observations, beliefs, and perceptions, that guarantees the conservation status of a resource; (2) in decision making, they respect the role of customary institutions that rely on cultural values (i.e., sharing and reciprocity), taboos, and customary sanctions, which also hold the transmission of the cumulative body of ecological knowledge; (3) they have developed an institutional learning and have integrated formal and informal mechanisms for flexible and rapid decision making; (4) they have reinforced community networks through trust building and social bonds to incentivize regulatory compliance; and (5) they are guided by local leaders who have a commitment to their community traditions and cultural values and who support sustainable management practices to enhance both the well-being of local people and biodiversity conservation. For example, Cree geese hunters in Canada relied on social memory and exchange of ecological observations to track geese population changes and related the latter to ecological disturbances.…”