Building Government-Non-Government Organization-Fisher Partnerships for Fisheries Management in Bangladesh

Abstract

"Increasing attention has been focused since the 1980's on common property resources, including fisheries. This has included studies of traditional management systems, and work to actively develop greater community participation in fishery management. As a reaction to past failures of central government management of fisheries, government and non-government organisations have worked to promote both overall co-management by fishers and government, and local community based management. Much of this work has focused on coastal resources, including fisheries, in a wide range of countries; but there are also important inland common property fisheries.

"Sugunan (1997) recently reviewed fisheries in 'small waterbodies' (up to 1000 ha) in seven countries. Although this focused on closed waterbodies suitable for stocking, it is directly relevant to Bangladesh where most inland fisheries are within this size range, although they form part of larger open systems. Sugunan found community waterbodies to be important in Zimbabwe, Northeastern Thailand, Northeastern Brazil and some parts of Mexico. In many cases these waterbodies had a history of common property and traditional access arrangements for associated communities. Government interventions varied from total state ownership in Cuba, to public ownership and licensing or auctioning of fishing rights in reservoirs etc. to cooperatives in India and Sri Lanka.

"In Zimbabwe and Brazil there have been initiatives to develop participatory management of common inland fisheries based on conservation and sustainable development and equitable sharing of resources in the community. This paper describes a similar initiative in Bangladesh, which is notable given the great importance of inland fisheries to much of the 120 million population. Through local community management experiments under this, and other projects, it is hoped to direct public policy towards workable co-management arrangements."