MARE People and the Sea X

Chaired by: Bush, S.

Rethinking tuna governance in Indonesia

Indonesia is one of the most important tuna fishing countries in the world. At the same time, the country faces a range of challenges in effectively governing both the sustainability of fishing activity and ensuring the sustainability of tuna dependent livelihoods. The three papers presented in this panel argue that in order to achieve both the ecological and social goals of tuna fisheries new governance approaches are needed. More specifically, the papers demonstrate the value of engaging the social relations that shape the use and reporting of tuna fishing practices. By focusing on these social relations we argue that more dynamic, informational and spatially sensitive approaches for fisheries governance can emerge that more effectively respond to the everyday social realities of catching tuna.


Towards a risk-based approach for governing tuna fisheries in Indonesia
Simon R. Bush, Hilde Toonen, Paul van Zwieten and Megan Bailey

Tuna fisheries in Indonesia are amongst the most diverse and complex in the world. However, the ongoing sustainability of these and other fisheries is questionable given up to 38% of Indonesian seafood products to the major markets like the US come from illegal and unreported sources. To ensure the ongoing contribution of these fisheries to local and national economies in Indonesia new approaches are needed to govern the sustainability of these resources fishery. Central to the risk posed by IUU fishing is the spatially proliferation of Fish Attraction Devices (FADs). There is no clear record of how many exist in Indonesian waters, and government regulation on numbers and their location remains unenforced. In light of the perceived failure of the state to govern FADs, a range of new technologies for surveilling fishing activity have been put in place by both private companies and NGOs. However, what potential the use of these systems hold for the improved governance of tuna fisheries, however, remains unclear. This paper explores the use of these new technologies and informational actors in moving towards a risk-based approach to management and assesses whether the new modes of surveillance these technologies enable lead to legitimate modes of tuna fisheries governance in Indonesia.
 

Drawing invisible lines: Boundary making and fish attraction devices in marine space
Rizkyana Dipananda and Simon R. Bush

This paper explores the governance of Fish Aggregating Devices (FADs) through various arrangements performed by different boundary making process. FADs are floating devices that are used by small and large scale fishers alike to increase the efficiency of finding and harvesting pelagic (oceanic) and neretic (coastal) tuna species. FADs are controversial in Indonesia because their widespread use is largely unregulated, unreported and thought to underpin the overexploitation of tuna as well as associated species such as sea-turtles and sharks. FADs are managed by the Indonesian government through their relative location to jurisdictional marine boundaries. This jurisdictional approach to management has, however, proven ineffective because of weak enforcement. In this paper we argue that the weakness of jurisdiction based management is also related to a fundamental neglect of the social relations that structure the everyday use of FADs. By engaging with these relations, including the patron-client relationships that enable access to vessels and FADs themselves, we argue that an alternative understanding of how marine space is used and can be governed emerges.
 

Towards a more Dynamic and Relational understanding of FAD fishing in Indonesia
Zac Edwards, Sietze Vellema and Simon R. Bush

In Indonesia, fish aggregation devices (FADs) inherently elicit competing rule systems that assume regulatory authority over access to the tuna that are aggregated below the devices. Understanding how these separate rule systems interact to enact the rule changing processes that shape the access arrangements to FAD associated tuna is an important knowledge gap facing researchers and policymakers alike. However, previously developed institutional analyses proved largely insufficient in accounting for the complexity and dynamism of such rule changing processes. In response, the Rule Systems Interface framework was formulated for the purpose of this research, building upon Ostrom’s study of rule systems by integrating key Institutional Ethnographic concepts and methods. This approach allowed for the examination of how rule changing processes are mediated in an amorphous manner via the interface between separate rule systems. Through employing this new approach this research was able to pinpoint the more successful methods employed by external actors in successfully influencing the rules-in-use of FAD fishermen. Thus, this paper provides a new type of institutional analysis that better engages with the dynamic and relational aspects of rule changing processes, and can help to diagnose the potentially more effective approaches to instigating behavioural change amongst resource-users.