In 1990, Elinor Ostrom proposed eight design principles, positing them to characterize robust institutions for managing common-pool resources such as forests or fisheries. Since then, many studies have explicitly or implicitly evaluated these design principles. We analyzed 91 such studies to evaluate the principles empirically and to consider what theoretical issues have arisen since their introduction. We found that the principles are well supported empirically and that several important theoretical issues warrant discussion. We provide a reformulation of the design principles, drawing from commonalities found in the studies.

/pdf/a-review-of-design-principles-for-community-based-natural-4mgo5qmiyy.pdf

A Review of Design Principles for Community-based Natural Resource Management

Why do some community-based natural resource management strategies perform better than others? Commons theorists have approached this question by developing institutional design principles to address collective choice situations, while other analysts have critiqued the underlying assumptions of community-based resource management. However, efforts to enhance community-based natural resource management performance also require an analysis of exogenous and endogenous variables that influence how social actors not only act collectively but do so in ways that respond to changing circumstances, foster learning, and build capacity for management adaptation. Drawing on examples from northern Canada and Southeast Asia, this article examines the relationship among adaptive capacity, community-based resource management performance, and the socio-institutional determinants of collective action, such as technical, financial, and legal constraints, and complex issues of politics, scale, knowledge, community and culture. An emphasis on adaptive capacity responds to a conceptual weakness in community-based natural resource management and highlights an emerging research and policy discourse that builds upon static design principles and the contested concepts in current management practice.

Adaptive Capacity and Community-Based Natural Resource Management

Contribution of Fisheries and Aquaculture to Food Security and Poverty Reduction: Assessing the Current Evidence

The concept of ecosystem services (ES), the benefits humans derive from ecosystems, is increasingly applied to environmental conservation, human well-being and poverty alleviation, and to inform the development of interventions. Payments for ecosystem services (PES) implicitly recognize the unequal distribution of the costs and benefits of maintaining ES, through monetary compensation from ‘winners’ to ‘losers’. Some research into PES has examined how such schemes affect poverty, while other literature addresses trade-offs between different ES. However, much evolving ES literature adopts an aggregated perspective of humans and their well-being, which can disregard critical issues for poverty alleviation. This paper identifies four issues with examples from coastal ES in developing countries. First, different groups derive well-being benefits from different ES, creating winners and losers as ES, change. Second, dynamic mechanisms of access determine who can benefit. Third, individuals' contexts and needs determine how ES contribute to well-being. Fourth, aggregated analyses may neglect crucial poverty alleviation mechanisms such as cash-based livelihoods. To inform the development of ES interventions that contribute to poverty alleviation, disaggregated analysis is needed that focuses on who derives which benefits from ecosystems, and how such benefits contribute to the well-being of the poor. These issues present challenges in data availability and selection of how and at which scales to disaggregate. Disaggregation can be applied spatially, but should also include social groupings, such as gender, age and ethnicity, and is most important where inequality is greatest. Existing tools, such as stakeholder analysis and equity weights, can improve the relevance of ES research to poverty alleviation.

/pdf/applying-the-ecosystem-services-concept-to-poverty-4w5myeohww.pdf

Applying the ecosystem services concept to poverty alleviation: the need to disaggregate human well-being

The objectives of this Technical Paper are to highlight the contribution that inland and coastal small-scale fisheries can make to poverty alleviation and food security and to make practical suggestions on ways that this contribution can be maximized. This paper is organized into three main sections. The first section discusses the concepts of poverty, vulnerability and food security, and briefly outlines how these concepts have evolved in recent years within the field of fisheries (in line with the rest of the development literature). The second section reviews the actual and potential contribution of small-scale fisheries to poverty alleviation and food security. It illustrates, through use of examples, the role that small-scale fisheries can play in economic growth at the national level and poverty alleviation and rural development at the local level.The third and main section of the document discusses ways of increasing the contribution of small-scale fisheries to poverty alleviation and food security.

Increasing the contribution of small-scale fisheries to poverty alleviation and food security

Conditions affecting the success of fisheries co-management: lessons from Asia

Fishery policy and job satisfaction in three southeast Asian fisheries

Presence, performance, and institutional resilience of sasi, a traditional management institution in Central Maluku, Indonesia

Between June 1997 and September 1998 collaborative research on fisheries management in Central Maluku, Indonesia, was carried out by Hualopu Foundation, Pattimura University and the International Center for Living Aquatic Resources Management (ICLARM) (Manila).1 The focus of the research was the inventory and institutional analysis of the traditional management system called sasi, but studies of formal government management as well as of the fish harvesting and marketing systems were also carried out. The result is a lengthy report (Novaczek & Harkes 1999) which can be obtained from ICLARM by those wishing to see the detailed data that back up the findings. What we present below is the executive summary of the research.

/pdf/marine-resource-management-in-central-maluku-indonesia-15w7ppdzke.pdf

Ingvild Harkes

Papers

Conditions affecting the success of fisheries co-management: lessons from Asia

Fishery policy and job satisfaction in three southeast Asian fisheries

Presence, performance, and institutional resilience of sasi, a traditional management institution in Central Maluku, Indonesia

Marine Resource Management in Central Maluku, Indonesia

Knowledge needs in realising the full potential of seaweed for world food provisioning