Small-scale managed marine areas over time: Developments and challenges in a local Fijian reef fishery

Abstract

This paper investigates the Locally Managed Marine Area (LMMA) approach through looking at developments and challenges of community-based marine resource management over time, with a particular focus on Fiji in the South Pacific region. A diachronic perspective, based on two multi-method empirical studies, is used to exemplify the social complexities of the implementation of this LMMA approach in a specific island setting. This perspective connects local stakeholders' establishment and management of a LMMA covering their entire customary fishing rights area (iqoliqoli) with the national context articulated around the Fiji Locally Managed Marine Area (FLMMA) network, as well as with regional networking and international conservation dynamics. It especially explores the impacts of a small-scale marine closure (so-called tabu area) on the harvesting patterns in a portion of this LMMA, related aspects of formal and informal enforcement, and villagers' views of the health of their reef fishery. This case study reveals a lack of consensus on the current management of this closure as a conditionally-opened no-take area, whose temporary openings (re)produce social tensions, as well as a lack of consensus on the effects of this closure on the reef fishery, which is subject to poaching. The paper highlights that the articulation between conservation and extraction of marine resources, as well as between short-term and longer-term objectives of the community-based marine resource management in place, is a complex sociopolitical process even at the most local level. The discussion also points out that local observations and interpretations of coastal resource dynamics, and of the interplay between fishery and community changes, might be instrumental in addressing the limits of the area-based system of management inherent in the LMMA approach. These insights into both the development process of the LMMA approach and the challenges of its local implementation and maintenance efforts can be useful to consider the adjustments necessary for Fiji's achievement of its national coastal fisheries management strategy and its international ocean governance commitments.