ThursdayFriday
April 29-30, 2004
102 Fishery Sciences
(auditorium)
Shankar AswaniAssociate Professor of Anthropology, University of California Santa BarbaraCustomary Sea Tenure in Oceania as a Case of Rights-Based Fishery Management: Does it Work? |
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Fishery managers are increasingly advocating for the use of rights-based fishery management schemes such as Individual Fishing Quotas (IFQ) and Common Property Resources (CPR) to efficiently allocate marine resources and avoid overfishing. In Oceania, however, a similar system, or customary sea tenure, has been in operation for centuries. Customary sea tenure is a situation in which identifiable groups of people have informal or formal rights to coastal areas, and in which their rights to use and access resources are, in principle, excludable, transferable, and enforceable, either on a conditional or permanent basis. Like other forms of property governance (e.g., private or state property), sea tenure institutions (i.e., the actors within) can effectively regulate resource use and access in some circumstances, but may fail in others. This presentation asks: What are the particular social, economic, and political factors that shape either the institutional robustness or vulnerability of sea-tenure regimes? And, what institutional arrangements are best suited to combine with precautionary management for regulating tropical multi-species fisheries? Answering these questions is crucial if sea tenures institutional governance and management structures are to be successfully incorporated into co-management programs between local fishers and government agencies in the Insular Pacific. More generally, understanding what circumstances make or break these indigenous institutions may teach us some lessons about implementing rights-based fishery management initiatives more effectively.
Shankar Aswani is a professor in the Department of Anthropology and in the Interdepartmental Graduate Program in Marine Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is an honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Auckland. Dr. Aswani conducts research in Pacific Island communities in the areas of anthropology, human ecology, and marine science, focusing on human and cultural ecology of insular coastal groups, property rights and common property resources, and marine indigenous ecological knowledge of populations in Melanesia and the Insular Pacific in general.
He is currently working on a major project titled "Rural Development and Community-based Resource Management in the Solomon Islands." This project has established a network of community-based Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) and seasonal "no-take" zones under customary sea tenure in the Roviana and Vonavona Lagoons, Western Province, Solomon Islands. Aswani also conducts the Roviana and Vonavona Lagoons Marine Resource Management Project, and the Human Palaeoecology in the Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia Project. He has published extensively on the culture and traditional fishing knowledge of the Pacific Islands, particularly the Solomon Islands.
Dr. Aswani received a B.A. in Marine Affairs and Anthropology from the University of Miami (1988), and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Hawaii (1997).
http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/faculty/aswani/
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