Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
to connect both land and sea-based human behavior with coastal marine ecologies;
coastal peoples can therefore be considered as participants in coastal marine
productivity, for better and for worse, and not just its exploiters.
Background
Marine resources - especially those of in-shore areas - are often heavily used by
coastal communities and their management is an urgent and challenging concern.
As appropriate coastal resource management regimes must be suited to local
ecological and socio-economic conditions, it is not easy to define or implement
nation-wide measures. In particular, integrating local economic and social needs
with national environmental conservation policies can prove problematic. A top-down
approach often fails to obtain local support and participation, eliciting suspicion
and perhaps even resentment from grass roots organizations and affected individuals
and their families. For this reason, collaborative approaches are vital in linking
government policy with local and other supporting agencies, including non-govern-
mental organizations (NGOs) and marine scientists, thus considerably improving
on their likelihoods of successful acceptance and implementation.
Marine resources can be sustainably managed in a number of different ways.
Strong conservation measures, such as the establishment of total allowable catch
(TAC) quotas, and the banning of destructive practices, such as blast fishing and
cyanide fishing, require local, national and international agreements for their proper
enforcement. In practice, however, such bans or regulations cannot be easily
enforced. Furthermore, such measures often depend on a fragile consensus between
quite disparate groups and communities of stakeholders.
The process of dialogue and debate between various stakeholders - including
groups of fishers, marine scientists, local and prefecture government officers, owners
of scuba diving outlets - with regards to the location and number of conservation
spots of Lethrinidae (breams) during the spawning season in the Yaeyama Islands has
been analyzed (Akimichi
2001
). This research suggests that, while marine
conservationists and government officers claimed strict geographical and temporal
catch restrictions, local fisher groups had various interpretations of the regulations,
even in regard to such alleged 'facts' as the number of conservation spots and dura-
tion of catch-restrictions. Stakeholder dialogues were often tense, heated and
complicated, as every fisher sought to increase his or her own catch. In a context in
which the total fish yield was unpredictable, the long-term sustainable management
emerged as an element of critical importance, even if it could not be clearly defined.
The concept of the 'commons' may facilitate integration of local conditions,
interests and practices into national and international regulations. Local fishers
invoked the idea of the local commons, especially in order to claim the right to
access traditional fishing areas, and to establish their long term responsibility and
entitlement for their use and management. Local fishers in particular defined the
need for the protection of the 'commons', as they blamed the high technology
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