term implications of their policies for traditional fishers. The industrialisation of the fishery off Kerala, India, during the 1970s is a helpful example of this.
Modern trawlers overexploited the resource meaning small-scale fishers experienced a 50 reduction in productivity between 1974 and 1982, a decline of
real per capita income from 850 to 420 rupees and per capita consumption of locally available fish also fell from 19 kilograms in 1971-2 to 9 kilograms in
1981-82 Kurien, 1993. Kent 1997 agrees that such policy tradeoffs have implications for food security for the poor. He contends that exports move fish
away from the poor because they cannot compete with the prices being paid and that the foreign revenue generated does not always trickle down to reach the poor.
An export policy may result in foreign exchange for businessmen and central government through taxation but policy makers need to recognise that unless this
money is consciously targeted at improving the welfare of traditional coastal communities they may be left out in the cold. One of the clear messages from
these policy papers is that policy makers must be clear about their goals and if their basic goal is to improve the standard of living for coastal communities the
focus should be broadened to include components such as food security, sanitation, education, lack of market access, infrastructure and encouraging
occupational diversity rather than specialisation Pomeroy et al. 2009, Bailey and Pomeroy, 1996, Allison and Ellis, 2001.
2.2 Co-management and Community Based Resource Management
2.2.1 Why Co-management?
Over the last 60 years there have been changes in attitudes in regard to the abundance of fish stocks and fisheries management strategies. Following the
Second World War there was a period of reconstruction of fishing fleets before expansion in the 1960s and 1970s. This expansion was triggered by the
development of new technologies that opened up distant waters for exploitation. During the 1980s the United Nations Law of the Sea enabled sovereign states to
claim an exclusive economic zone EEZ out to 200 nautical miles. This redistributed effort and fishing access, bringing great swathes of the ocean under
the jurisdiction of nation states Berkes et al., 2001. During the 1980s and 1990s
there was increasing awareness of the problem of overexploitation, leading to serial depletion of fish stocks and conflict between user groups. Centralised
fisheries management, a legacy from the colonial and neo-colonial era, had proved ineffective and out of touch with the concerns of many fishing communities.
Focused primarily on the biological state of the resource, this top down management failed to consider the social, economic, institutional and political
aspects of fisheries management, failed to involve resource users in the process and built up barriers between those who use the resource and those who police the
resource. Towards the end of the 20
th
Century there were renewed calls for sustainable management of ocean resources with a key component of these
petitions being that resource users must become more involved in the decision making and management of the resource on which they depended.
As a result the research literature has increasingly focused on various forms of partnership where management responsibility is shared between
governments and fishing communities. These are broadly referred to as co- management and can be viewed as a “set of institutional and organisational
arrangements rights and rules, which define the cooperation among the fisheries administration and relevant fishing communities” Raakjaer Nielsen et al., 2004.
Community based resource management CBRM is the people centred and community focused aspect of co-management. Co-management more generally
includes national and regional aspects, the partnership agreement between stakeholders and the government and the legal basis that underpins this
partnership. The two main drivers of co-management are democracy involvement of
citizens in decision making that affects their future and efficacy involvement of stakeholders to improve compliance and reduce enforcement costs. There is a
continuum of co-management from complete community control at one end of the spectrum, to the community being informed about decisions already made by the
government at the other, and many stages in between see Sen and Raakjaer Nielsen, 1996. The different forms of co-management are determined by how
much emphasis is placed on democracy or efficacy. At one extreme Raakjaer Nielsen et al., 2004, Instrumental co-
management is when governments involve local communities in the
implementation phase only. Governments have been wary of power-sharing, preferring instead to retain the ability to set management objectives and determine
what knowledge to include in the decision-making process. Predominantly for reasons of efficacy rather than democracy, stakeholders are involved at the end of
the process to ensure that the government’s objectives rather than government plus local people’s objectives are implemented as efficiently as possible. One of
the risks of this form of co-management is that it builds false expectations of true empowerment and participation in the decision making process and fails to deliver
on these expectations. At the other extreme, Empowering fisheries co-management does indeed
deliver in regard to those expectations of empowerment and involvement. It is a bold move by the government to relinquish control and to empower communities
to influence their own future by setting management objectives and identifying the knowledge base for decision-making.
2.2.2 Components of Co-management
