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Conference Paper Aquaculture for Rural Development (ARD) in the Philippines: Privatization vs. Community Property Rights(2006) Escober, J.E.J."In the Philippines, a de facto open-access situation in fisheries persists despite progressive fishery laws in recent years that allocate use of coastal and inland areas between artisanal fishers on the one hand, and commercial capture fishers and aquaculture operators on the other hand. Weak state institutions and lax implementation of laws have gone hand in hand with a threefold increase in the last twenty years in the population of artisanal fishers eking out subsistence from badly degraded fishery resources and coastal ecosystems. "Advocates and practitioners of community-based coastal resources management (CBCRM) in the country have pushed for the adoption of community property rights (CPR) systems that would address open access, bring cost and benefit decisions together, foster sustainable resource use and mitigate socioeconomic inequities in coastal communities. "However, a cause for concern is the gathering momentum in the implementation of the Aquaculture for Rural Development (ARD) program of the government. There has been widespread criticism to this approach among artisanal fishers, which they see as a reprise of shrimp aquaculture expansion that resulted in the clear cutting of mangrove forests from the 1960s to the mid 1990s. "The ARD program is likely to result in more negative externalities, heightened conflict over coastal resources, and increased income disparity and poverty for artisanal fishers and coastal communities. It will induce the entry of opportunistic "investors" interested in short- term financial gains but not in the sustainable utilization of resources over the long term. Thus, it is a looming threat to community property rights regimes that are still in the early stages of development by local fisherfolk organizations and their allied institutions. "In achieving community property rights, it is envisioned that negative externalities will be minimized or eliminated altogether, and the continuity of benefit streams (to the community and society as a whole) ensured in the long run. This framework can be effectively employed in countering trends towards privatization of coastal resources that is likely to accompany the implementation of the ARD program being bruited by the national government. "Amid projections of a slowdown of production growth in capture fisheries, government is putting priority on the establishment of marine aquaculture parks, initially in selected sites across the country but eventually on a widespread basis. Most, if not all, of these areas are within municipal waters and conflict between mariculture operators and municipal capture fishers is expected "To ensure sustainable and equitable management of fisheries and coastal resources, including both capture and culture activities in nearshore waters, municipal fisherfolk should effectively hold preferential use rights to these areas to which they are entitled based on existing laws. Further, any development leading towards the expansion of marine aquaculture must be within the context of comprehensive coastal resource management plans (RMPs), which would include limits to the extent of these areas, zonation of municipal waters, internalization of environmental costs to be borne by mariculture operators, support services for fisherfolk cooperatives engaged in aquaculture and measures such as environmental bonds to operationalize the precautionary principle."Conference Paper Watershed Management in New South Wales, Australia: A Case of Constrained Decentralization?(2006) Fidelman, Pedro"In Australia, catchment management--a watershed management initiative--is an example of moving decision-making for NRM from the State to the catchment (watershed) level. New South Wales (NSW) was the first Australian State to adopt catchment management as a state-wide statutory policy, in the late 1980s. Catchment management has since undergone a number of institutional changes. Specific legislation, for instance, have been introduced and reformed, such as the Catchment Management Act 1989, the Catchment Management Regulation 1999, and the Catchment Management Authorities Act 2003. Consequently, Catchment Management Committees, which operated in the 1990s were replaced by Catchment Management Boards in 2000, which in turn, have recently been replaced with Catchment Management Authorities. "This paper presents preliminary findings from a broader study on the NSW catchment management initiative. The paper examines decentralized approaches to NRM as part of such a NSW initiative. Catchment management institutions are analyzed by applying the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework in combination with the recent theorizing on decentralization of NRM."Conference Paper Study on Water Utilization in Chinese Rural Areas(2006) Rong, Tan; Zhiyong, Yu; Jie, Cui"In China, because rural population is great and agriculture is very important in national economy, rural areas have becomes a main sphere of water consume. There exist the problems of water shortage and water waste in the countryside. The conflicts of water resource supply and demand between industry and agriculture are very conspicuous. Various factors that include ideology, finance, technology, management and policy restrict the rational and effective use of water resource. The survey on the villages of Jia Ge Zhuang and Yao Bai Zhuang in Ji County, Tianjin reflects these problems. The government tries to solve the problems by making laws and policies, as well as affording financial and technology support to towns and villages. At the same time, it is necessary for the government to make officials and farmers realize the importance of rational water usage and saving by doing propaganda, coordinating the inter-governments relations, and defining the departments' duties. For realizing the objective of rational water usage, it is necessary to take measures to construct and perfect irrigation installations by both superior and local governments' investment and farmers' labor force."Conference Paper Water Allocation in an Economy in Transition: Institutional Challenges and Opportunities in Vietnam(2006) Olszak, Chris"Therefore, the aims of this paper are to contribute toward: understanding the practical institutional challenges in relation to water allocation reform in Vietnam: identifying and discussing a number of possible options for Vietnam and discussing the importance of timing and sequence in their implementation and; the broader policy debate surrounding water allocation in developing and other countries whose economies are in transition. "Section 2 begins with a description of the changing socio- economic patterns driving increases in the types and amount of water used in both consumptive and non-consumptive sectors. It then outlines the critical national resource management issues that have developed, provides an assessment of water scarcity and the need for allocation responses, and demonstrates how growing demand and development create new resource management challenges and add to the complexity of developing a sustainable water allocation system. "Section 3 draws on existing institutional analysis frameworks to examine the linkages between external institutional factors, internal institutional structures and water sector performance. In particular, it demonstrates how the incomplete political-economic transition affects policy and decision-making, that this has resulted in changes in the organisational structure and roles and responsibilities of national level agencies involved in water management, and, in turn, this has contributed to ineffective water rights and allocation mechanisms at an inter-sectoral scale. "Section 4 draws on the findings of the institutional analysis as well as key international lessons in water rights reform to outline elements of a phased reform process for Vietnam focusing on: improving coordination and commitment through understanding and inclusion; developing rules for inter-sectoral allocation that allow transparent, adaptive management to take place; and strengthening of institutional networks as a necessary strategy to strengthen rights before market based approaches can even be considered. Emphasis is placed on the need to build capacity in each of the three phases. "Section 5 concludes the paper by summarising the key arguments. Evidence for the paper is drawn mainly from the experience of the author working for one year in the Bureau of Policy and Planning in the Department of Water Resources Management (DWRM), Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment (MONRE). This included designing and implementing a national level cross-Ministerial consultation process on water allocation and a rapid sub-basin scale case-study conducted from June to November 2005. These activities were funded by the United States Asia Environment Program (USAEP) of USAID and aimed at identifying and exploring the issues and challenges associated with water allocation planning and management in Vietnam. The case study examined the competing demands for water across the six provinces in the Nhue-Day subriver basin, which is part of the Red River Delta. It aimed to demonstrate how a participatory (bottom up) approach could be combined with economic valuation techniques (top-down) to demonstrate trade-offs to decision-makers and contribute towards identifying equitable, efficient and sustainable inter-sectoral allocation rules. "This paper is based on this experience and extensive discussions with many people. Any opinions expressed are those of the author and any errors and omissions are entirely the responsibility of the author."Conference Paper Quantitative Approach to Subsidize the Precautionary Management of the Smallscale Fisheries in Itaipu Reservoir, Brazil(2006) Camargo, S. A. F. de; Okada, E. K.; Petrere, M."Professional inland fisheries are an important economic activity in the region of Itaipu reservoir (135000 ha of inundated area, 12600 MW of nominal generation power), located on the Paraná River at the Brazil/Paraguay border (Paraná River is 4695 km long; Paraná/La Plata basin has a drainage area of 2800000 km2). The dam was closed in 1982, and before this landing data were scarce. In 1985 it an agreement was set between the UEM (Universidade Estadual de Maringá) and ITAIPUBINACIONAL (the Brazilian/ Paraguayan Agency that operates the dam) to collect landing data (FUEM 2002). In 1998, 619 professional fishermen landed 1192t of fish, of 10 commercial species, captured by nets and hooks (Petrere et al. 2002). "Due to legal exigencies, after the dam closure, Itaipu was obligated to the royalties' payment to the municipalities in the region of the reservoir. In practice, between 1991 and 2001, it was observed a strong negative relation between the amount of royalties transferred to the municipalities and the fishing effort (of professional fisheries). Hypothetically, a fall in the fishing effort can occurred due to the increase of employment level of the population of these municipalities in other sectors of economy affected by the royalties (for example: agriculture and commerce). "In this context, the aim of this paper is to propose a preliminary bio-mathematical model to subsidize the formulation of guidelines, based on the statements of precautionary management, as the predominant orientation in the juridical literature. Specifically, it is intended to elaborate a model via the software Vensim PLE to describe and predicting small-scale fisheries consequences upon the reservoir fish stock, and to test the relation between the decrease of fishing effort and Itaipu royalties' payment to the municipalities in the region of the reservoir via a regression model."Conference Paper Institutional Landscapes in Common Pool Resource Management: A Case Study of Irrigation Tanks in South India(2006) Balasubramanian, R."Irrigation tanks, which are one of the oldest common pool water resources in the coastal plains of South India, have been declining rapidly in recent years due to several factors. In response, people adopt various coping strategies such as migration, nonagricultural employment, and private tube-wells. This paper analyses the causes of tank degradation and the interrelationships among poverty, private coping mechanisms and collective action towards tank management. This paper shows that the increase in private wells has a strong negative effect on collective efforts for tank management. Poor people, who are more dependent on tanks, contribute more towards tank management compared to non-poor households. The study proposes several policy measures to revive and sustain the tanks."Conference Paper An Interdisciplinary Systems Analysis of Land-Use Changes and Forest/ Soil Degradation at the Watershed Level in Nepal using Dynamic Bio-economic Model(2006) Upadhyay, Thakur Prasad"Researchers, planners and other concerned institutions are contending with varied arguments and explanations on burning issues of deforestation and forests/soil degradation in the Himalayan region for long; and a common consensus regarding the causes of these processes has not been reached yet. Since land-use, land-use changes especially agricultural land expansion and degradation of forests and soil in developing country are related to socio-economic characteristics, population and livestock growth, technological change, consumption patterns, etc., their dynamics need to be analyzed by incorporating both the socio-economic behavior and ecological processes simultaneously. This paper, representing an effort to offer some deep insights in this debatable topic, discusses and develops a dynamic bio- economic model for analyzing land use changes and forest/soil degradation processes under systems approach. The modeling technique is basically drawn from simultaneous global optimization with mathematical programming algorithm which incorporates both the production and consumption problems at the watershed level in Nepal. Five different relevant policy scenarios, namely business as usual with two per cent population growth rate and five percent of discount rate (and other parameters and scalars), reducing population growth rate to 1.5 per cent per annum, increasing prices of major crops (maize, paddy, wheat and millets) by 10 per cent, reducing emigration of active labor force from current rate of 20 to 10 and 15 per cent from the watershed have been tested. Planning horizon of the model extends for 25 years and the objective function consists of discounted net income flow from agriculture, livestock and forestry production subject to constraints on land, labor and capital availability along with the fulfillment of minimum cash and consumption requirements for the entire watershed in each period. The outcomes of this modeling exercise indicate that while reduced labor emigration rates and increase in major agricultural crops' prices lead to expansion of agricultural land at the cost of forest and other non- agricultural lands and shift of clearing activity from degraded forest to nearby forest land and more soil loss; reduced population growth rate shows the opposite effect. The land clearing is severer in the case of reducing emigration rate to 10 per cent than 15 per cent. Thus the model disentangles the systems behaviors of both socio-economic and ecological interactions at the watershed level with policy implications on reduction of population growth and maintaining current rate of off-farm employment for slowing down the agricultural expansion and processes of forest/soil degradation."Conference Paper Subak's Social Capital: Could They Enhance the Existence?(2006) Utari, Nyoman V.; Gonarsyah, Isang; Rustiadi, Ernan; Juanda, Bambang"Subaks are traditional organization in Bali which managing water for rice field. Subaks have existed for centuries and characterized by a common source of water with the subak's water temple in close proximity, one or more rice field temples, written or unwritten rules and full autonomy for managing its own affairs. A subak, with its carefully crafted rules, roles, right and responsibilities, is one of the world's best example of long-enduring, local resource management system (Asian Development Bank, 1997). Recently, where demand for non-agricultural lands have been sharply increased, subaks have a significant role in controlling land use conversion and many social environmental resource rent. As a traditional organization, subaks have strong norms that correlate with religious activity. That is why all members of subaks have high participation on every collective action. The existence of subaks is not only dependent on norms but also on social capital as a whole such as trust and network. The organization needs to strengthen the trust building and develop its network to achive high social capital level. The aim of this research is to analyze the social capital of subaks and its role on agricultural and natural resources. The data collected from the several villages in Bali Province include four regency that is Jembrana, Karangasem, Badung and Gianyar. In this paper, therefore, we compare between subak's social capital as a traditional organization in agricultural community and social capital of modern organization e.g. tourism. The results indicate that there is significant relationship between kind of job and level of thick trust. Subak have lower level of general trust and higher network density than modern organization. The general implication of this research is involving on organization not depend on trustworthy but depend on norm and sanction only."Conference Paper Collaborative Community-Based Management of the Aesesa Watershed, Indonesia(2006) Maan, Yosef; Polomaing, Ben; Suardika, Putra; Asmoro, Priyo; Merza, Mae-Ann; Joicey, Paul"The Aesesa watershed is one of the driest, and most important, watersheds in eastern Indonesia. Despite only three months of rain every year, Aesesa is the main water source and rice production area for Ngada - the health of the watershed is therefore critical for food security, livelihoods and for community and environmental health. Local communities mainly practice smallholder, shifting agriculture, face limited and declining water sources, and land use conflicts are common among different ethnic groups. Land cover is mainly open grassland and issues of deforestation, declining soil quality and erosion are common. "Opposition to government plans to build a dam in Aesesa stimulated local interest in the issue of watershed management. Local stakeholders began addressing the issue in 2003, through the development of a multi-stakeholder, collaborative approach to the management of the Aesesa watershed, involving local government and forestry service officials, community representatives and local NGOs. Agreement was reached to focus initially on the Aemau micro-watershed, one of the driest (and largest) parts of the Aesesa watershed, and home to 5,798 people in 13 villages. "Since the beginning of the multi-stakeholder approach, a number of key activities have been carried out, including participatory community appraisals, participatory analysis of community livelihood assets and government policies. Based on this research, joint management plans were developed through village level community agreements, and between villages and at the district level. Central to this approach was the development of a multi-stakeholder team to drive the process, involvement of community members at all stages, and the development of strong community-based organizations at the village and micro-watershed level. Success has been achieved through the acceptance of the community-based development plans by the local government, and through integration of these plans into the mainstream government planning system. "Development of the multi-stakeholder approach has led to a number of key lessons. Working initially at the level of the micro-watershed was critical in facilitating meaningful community participation, in maintaining a balance between field-based 'concrete' activities such as agro- forestry, with direct felt benefits, and more process oriented activities such as workshops, seminars and meetings, and the development of learning media. Government commitment and support was crucial, as has been the integration of the results of community assessments into the government planning system. Participatory action learning processes at the community and policy level produced much useful information in a democratic manner, and succeeded in developing a new level of critical awareness about the importance of collaboration and integration within the programme. "Despite some successes, many challenges remain. The role and needs of women in watershed management needs to be strengthened. Community organizations remain weak, and some traditional structures are unsupportive of sustainable development. Collaboration between upstream and downstream communities, despite their interdependency, has yet to become a reality. Local government development policies remain focused on natural resource extraction to gather local revenue. Local NGOs and donors have a short-term, project-based approach, despite the fact that the development of collaborative multi-stakeholder processes requires long-term commitment and support."Conference Paper How to Invest in Social Capital? Lessons from Managing Coral Reef Ecosystems: Case from South Sulawesi, Indonesia(2006) Prasetiamartati, Budiati"Social capital defined as trust, norms of reciprocity, and networks, is believed to facilitate the formation of collective action and institution. It is significant for natural resource management, while it might alleviate problems associated with common-pool resources (Ostrom 1990, Dollak and Ostrom 2003, Birner and Wittmer 2004, Grafton 2005). Following this concept, this study tries to seek whether investment in social capital, which includes promotion on stakeholder conferences, training of community leaders, and support for fishing organizations (Isham 2001, Folke et al 2005), can promote collective action and self-governance of resource use in coral reef ecosystem at local level. "Coral reef ecosystem in South Sulawesi has been pressured by reef-related fishing activities, which include destructive practices of blast and poison fishing. The analysis is based on a field study done between 2004-2005 in five selected small islands situated in Taka Bonerate Marine National Park and Spermonde Archipelago, South Sulawesi, Indonesia. These islands had been underwent a process of social capital investment. "Findings suggest that local rules or institutions to govern coral reef management are not yet endured. This occurs because fishers are not able to overcome collective action dilemmas, generally encountered by resource users in appropriating common-pool resources. Collective action is influenced by the extent of bonding, bridging and linking social capital held by fisher communities. Networks of conflicting interests exist. The analysis concludes on how to proceed with social capital investment, what limitations it possesses, and what opportunities to seize."