Community Responses to Environmental Degradation Due to Shrimp Aquaculture in Bangladesh

Abstract

"This paper looks at community responses to adverse impact of shrimp aquaculture on environment in semi-saline zones in Bangladesh. This is an important issue because if we do not know how people are responding to such changes in agrienvironment we cannot formulate any effective resource management policy.

"We have developed a simple framework to study community responses to environmental degradation. One can observe responses from the insiders those who immediately suffer from environmental degradation, and from the outsiders (NGOs, civil society) who side with the insiders. These actors can respond directly to environmental degradation, say by launching a strong movement against shrimp culture. They can also respond indirectly and this is subtle. Actors can write contracts to maximise their gains which in effect can reduce environmental degradation as an unintended outcome. In this framework the key outside agent is the NGOs. Direct response, in its purest form, encapsulates collective action issues where the environment is the explicit concern. Indirect response involves immediate profit maximisation where environment may not be an argument in the individual calculus but can still come up consequentially in an implicit way. Most responses to environmental degradation due to shrimp culture in Bangladesh fall in these four categories (insider-direct, outsider-direct, insider indirect, outsider-indirect) or a combination of them with differential weights."