One size does not fit all: Critical insights for effective community-based resource management in Melanesia

Highlight

• Organizational variability and marine conservation in Melanesia.

• Nested and polycentric governance systems.

• Fiji compared to Solomon Islands and Vanuatu.

Abstract

In recent years, Fiji's approach of combining traditional systems of community-based coastal management and modern management systems has become a successful blueprint for marine conservation, particularly the Locally Managed Marine Area (LMMA) network model. As a result of this success, conservation practitioners have imported the Fiji LMMA model to the Solomon Islands and in Vanuatu in hope of replicating the purported success attained in Fiji. This paper argues that because tenure systems and associated political systems in Fiji, the Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu are substantially different, one cannot simply extrapolate the more centralized tenurial and political Fiji model to the decentralized tenurial and politically eclectic Solomons and Vanuatu. This paper provides an analysis of some of the various approaches used in these countries to make a case for why socio-political diversity and historical particulars matter to resource management and conservation-in-practice (and for any development interventions). By examining examples of various nested and polycentric governance approaches—family, community, tribal, confederations, local community-based organizations (CBOs), and Church—it elucidate not only some of the differences between Fiji and Solomon Islands/Vanuatu, but also between Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands. This provides critical insights into some of the myriad of factors impinging on conservation aspirations in these countries and may offer some alternative ways forward not currently considered by conservation practitioners. Finally, the paper provides some guidelines to how to increase the long-term success of marine conservation programs for fisheries management and community-based management initiatives in the region.

Introduction

Coral reef ecosystems provide critical economic, cultural, aesthetic and subsistence services to the rural communities of Pacific Island nations. However, over recent decades these ecosystems have been increasingly threatened by local (land-based runoff and overfishing) and regional (industrial fishing and climate change) pressures. This has raised concern, particularly amongst local, regional, and northern hemisphere non-government organizations (NGOs) as well as regional multilateral and state donor agencies. Simultaneously, numerous efforts at safeguarding marine ecosystems in the region have been attempted, ranging from externally driven top down initiatives to informal, ad-hoc grass roots initiatives. More prominently, community-based marine conservation efforts have expanded across the Pacific Islands (e.g., [53], [23], [65]), as human activities have begun to impact previously healthy and biodiverse marine habitats [60], [2], [15]. Of all Island nations, Fiji's approach of combining traditional systems of coastal management and modern management systems (e.g., [63], [64]) has become a successful model for marine conservation to be emulated by other nation states via the efforts of government agencies, local stakeholders, NGOs, and other donors.

Perhaps the most successful approach has been the Locally Managed Marine Area (LMMA) network (www.lmmanetwork.org) which was born from a handful of communities in Fiji collaborating with the University of the South Pacific to develop local management strategies to address declining invertebrate stocks [59]. The Fiji LMMA or FLMMA approach empowers local stakeholders to use their coastal systems of customary management to establish locally-managed marine areas for sustainable marine resource management and conservation. The FLMMA approach is taken as a “synonym” for community-based marine resource management (CBMRM) that may or may not utilize a co-management strategy (with government, NGO or donor partners) [66], [16] and has multiple objectives beyond merely enhancing sustainable fisheries (e.g., [37]). Today, FLMMA's aim to improve short-term harvesting efficiency, restore biodiversity and ecosystem heath, increase food security for coastal people's, reinforce custom, enhance livelihoods, and empower local communities through the recognition of their ancestral rights, amongst other benefits [24], [44], [61], [37], [28]. This approach is also deemed to provide a mechanism for communities to work together in a collective, to share knowledge and gain new tools to manage coastal ecosystems [37]. In light of the success and spread of this approach in Fiji and elsewhere in the region, conservation practitioners have imported the FLMMA model of community based resource management to the Solomons Islands and in Vanuatu in hope of replicating the purported success attained in Fiji. The approach has become a resource management ‘blueprint’; the conservation equivalent to “fast policy” where ideas born in one locale are quickly transferred to another location (e.g., [49]). Indeed, resource managers do acknowledge that marine resources are being over-exploited in Fiji [22] and accept that communities across the country may differ from one another in terms of their conservation efforts (e.g., implementation of “taboos”) and outcomes [36]. Yet, notwithstanding these acknowledgments, conservation practitioners accept the FLMMA approach as the best model to follow under the prevailing political, economic, and cultural circumstances of Fiji and the Pacific more generally (e.g., [25], [37]). Thus, the LMMA blueprint is being exported beyond Fiji and current conservation approaches and practices suggest that incoming managers and conservation practitioners (from various NGOs) in the Solomons and Vanuatu have the underlying assumption that “Melanesian” countries share a similar political and social-cultural context, chiefly forms of political hierarchies and customary management, and inclusive customary marine tenure.

Based on analysis of various resource management approaches and the authors’ experience in researching and establishing conservation programs in the region, this paper argues that the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu are not Fiji. Examining a variety of local institutional organizations in both countries, this paper argues that exporting the LMMA model of community-based resource management may not find the same traction in these contexts as in Fiji. There is no doubt that the LMMA model has been relatively successful in Fiji and continues to provide a powerful example of the effectiveness of bottom-up management [19], [37]. However, the spread to other areas of the Pacific has been largely based on this success in Fiji with limited assessment of how the sociocultural diversity and historical particulars of other regions may impinge on the effectiveness of the neat transfer of the LMMA model.

This paper also provides an analysis of approaches to resource management at different organizational levels in the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu to make a case for why socio-political diversity and historical particulars matter to resource management and conservation-in-practice and, in fact, for any other developmental intervention (albeit this is not discussed here). By examining examples of various nested and polycentric governance approaches—family, community, tribal, confederations, local community-based organizations (CBOs), and Church—it elucidates not only some of the differences between Fiji and Solomon Islands/Vanuatu, but also between Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands. This provides critical insights into some of the myriad factors impinging on conservation aspirations in these countries and may offer some alternative ways forward not currently considered in the LMMA/CBMRM model. To conclude, in the context of the comparative analysis, the paper provides some insights for increasing the long-term success of community-based management marine conservation programs in the region, particularly Melanesia.