Abstract
In 2015, the Indonesian government announced that it would prohibit the operation of the so-called cantrang (Danish Seine). The stated purpose of the cantrang ban was to make marine fisheries more environmentally sustainable. In response, cantrang fishers along the north coast of Java staged mass protests, and after 3 years of negotiations and uncertainty, the government exempted the cantrang fleets on the Java north coast from the policy. This paper analyses fishers’ responses to the ban from a historical and ethnographic perspective. Specifically, it compares the cantrang ban to two earlier government interventions in the fisheries on the Java north coast, one in 1905, the second 1980/81. With each intervention, a new governance principle was introduced to small-scale fisheries, established elites transferred their capital elsewhere, and new elites emerged who supported the new principle locally. Since 2015, however, only very few members of the established elites have exited the cantrang fishery, and no members of a new local elite have emerged yet who would support sustainability as a governance principle for fisheries. The paper aims to clarify why this was the case. More generally, it suggests that understanding the history of fisheries governance on the Java north coast requires attention to the role of local elites, and therefore to social differentiations among fishers.
Highlights
Paul Durrenberger (1988: 211) famously observed that “fishermen fish for a living
We review fishers’ responses to the cantrang ban, and we try to explain their firm rejection of it and the government’s eventual retreat in light of two previous government interventions in the fisheries on the Java north coast
To summarize our key findings, one point of contrast between the cantrang ban and previous interventions concerns the social, political and economic position of the established elites and their ability to transfer their capital out of the fishery; another is the readiness of new elites to assume their role as local bearers of a new governance principle
Summary
Paul Durrenberger (1988: 211) famously observed that “fishermen fish for a living. They do not make a living by going to meetings”. They collectively limited access to the auction according to their joint best interests, they organized shadow plays and financed rituals and social events, and fishers could turn to them for emergency funds in times of need They created informal, highly responsive personalized relations of dependence inside the new governance mechanism of fisheries organisations that were meant to bring fishers under the direct protection of the state. This pattern of mediated state paternalism, implemented in the fishing villages by local elites, continued after independence, with minor modifications. Bailey argued that the ban resulted, in the final instance, not from scientists’ or political interests, but from small-scale fishers’ demonstration of
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