Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
How then were such fisheries originally regulated? Being marginal, governments -
if they existed - generally evinced little interest,
8
and fishers had to regulate them-
selves, if at all. This, however, is probably what they had being doing from the start.
After all, as Benda-Beckmann note, “resource allocation is never unstructured because
continuity in the production of basic goods is never unimportant“ (1995: 1; Dalton
1967). As fishing carried out on a regular basis produced the 'basic goods' necessary
for immediate sustenance or for trade, we may assume that fisher societies developed
their own rules for proper behavior, as well as ways to implement them.
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Economics
in rural societies never being completely separated from other spheres such as family,
religion, and politics, meant that fishing regulations became part of more comprehen-
sive yet monoistic legal systems, presided over by traditional authorities who - unlike
most outsiders - were knowledgeable of the intricacies of the profession. In terms of
interactive governance theory, this generally amounted to self-governance.
Collective action theory (Ostrom 1990; 2007), which has drawn attention to
the fact that users of common pool resources will, under certain conditions, develop
appropriate management arrangements, lends support to the view of self-governance.
Proponents of the collective action approach have made substantial effort to deter-
mine the circumstances under which this may or may not arise, and how such ventures
can be suitably nested. Evidence of collective action in resource management has been
found in contemporary fisheries systems around the world (Kurien 1987; Ruddle and
Satria 2010). Anthropologists have also 'discovered' social strictures that are not cov-
ered by the term resource management as it is commonly understood, but do act to
regulate fisher's lives. These include, for example, the taboos that often prevail in fish-
ing societies (Malinowski 1992; Van Ginkel 1987; Colding and Folke 2000; Cinner
and Aswani, 2007).
How do conflicts over fishing manifest themselves in self-governed societies such as
the one described above? Rapoport's (1974) taxonomy, which distinguishes endoge-
nous from exogenous conflict, is a useful pointer. Endogenous conflicts are those
wherein the conflicting units “are part of a larger system that has its own mecha-
nisms for maintaining a steady state, which may include mechanisms for controlling
or resolving conflict'' between the units (Rapopport 1974: 175). To clarify, Rapoport
(1974) provides the example of a state in which two citizens conflict. The state (the
larger system) has means to prevent the conflict from exceeding certain bounds (such
as through the application of force) and institutions to resolve the conflict (courts,
etc.). Exogenous conflicts, on the other hand, take place between units that belong
to different systems and lack a joint facility for control or resolution. Following this
line of thought, Bavinck (2011b), writing about the fishing wars that occur between
fishers of two neighboring states of India, concludes that conflicts which involve peo-
ple within the boundaries of the self-governing fisher system are better contained and
addressed than those that involve parties from different institutional systems, where
there are no joint mechanisms for conflict resolution within its boundaries. The latter
type of conflicts are potentially more explosive and possibly of longer duration.
8
Here again there are exceptions, such as for high value sea products such as pearls, chanks etc.
9
Anthropological studies of primitive societies in which fishing plays an important economic
role testify to the regulated nature of such activity (e.g. Malinowski 1922; Radcliffe-Brown
1922; Firth 1946).
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