Recent evolution of village-based marine resource management in Vanuatu

Abstract

In 1993 a study of coastal villages in Vanuatu revealed that within the previous three years there had been a rapid increase in marine resource management (MRM) activities. The initial impetus for these events was the Vanuatu Fisheries Department’s promotion of a voluntary, village-based trochus management programme. Initially the programme involved only a few fishing villages out of a total of several hundred. The Department surveyed their community trochus stocks, advised the people that regular several-year closures of their trochus fishery, followed by brief openings, would generate far more profit than the usual practice of harvesting continually. They left it to the villagers to decide whether or not to act on this advice. The 1993 study revealed that villages that followed this advice found it so profitable that other villages quickly followed suit. Moreover, seeing what conservation could do for their trochus stocks, many villages decided to implement their own conservation measures to protect other marine animals, including finfishes, lobsters, clams, beche-de-mer (sea cucumbers)2 and crabs, as well as to ban or restrict certain harmful fishing practices such as night spearfishing and the use of nets, especially gill nets. One of the surveyed villages set up a marine protected area and stocked it with giant clams (Tridacna spp. and Hippopus hippopus). In 2001, we resurveyed 21 of the villages surveyed in 1993 to determine how successful these communityinitiated management measures had been in the eyes of the villagers. This was done by determining how many MRM measures had lapsed and how many new ones had been initiated. Our reasoning was that maintaining or increasing MRM measures, which all entail short- or medium-term sacrifices to fishers, would only happen if the fishers thought they were worth the longer-term benefits. Our results revealed that village-based MRM measures had more than doubled between 1993 and 2001. There were a total of 40 MRM measures in the 21 villages in 1993. By 2001 five of these had lapsed but 51 new ones had been implemented.