As coastal communities in most developing countries have pursued the path of unregulated economic development, government sanctioned exploitation of fishery resources has in many cases imperiled their sustainability. Central governments have been urged to pursue the natural resource devolution with adverse impacts on local communities. In some cases local users have organized and demanded greater roles in local resource management in response to its degradation. Approaches including community-based management, co-management and adaptive co-management (ACM) have been instituted. ACM constitutes a mature stage with the highest level of stakeholder participation, social learning and input-output adaptation for system sustainability.
This study employed qualitative, field study methods to examine the interactions of community, government and other stakeholders regarding fishery and coastal resources in Phangnga Bay in Southern Thailand. It focused on the period of the last 15 years during which coastal communities experienced a resource crisis, organized to demand government action, and developed networks for communication, learning and resource management. These steps, in concert with evolving government policy calling for devolution, created conditions favoring the adoption of ACM. The study examines the problems and responses of three Thai-Muslim villages which pursued various strategies of interaction with government and other stakeholders.
Findings indicate that these Thai-Muslim communities experienced grave resource depletion due to outside illegal activities. NGO support led to networking across local villages enabling pressure on the government sufficient to bring about some needed changes in laws governing access to and use of local fishery. The study also formulates a systems model of ACM highlighting three input factors: natural resources, community and other stakeholders and three process factors: communication, sharing of responsibility and power and learning. The study presents evidence that each village exhibited notable progress on some, but not all of these factors, with a somewhat different configuration for each village. The study notes that the emerging government policy of civic assembly (prachakhom) has promise for actualizing ACM.
