Sustainable management and long-term access to ponds

In Bangladesh, inland fisheries are critically important to food security and livelihoods in over 80 per cent of the country’s rural households. However, access to lakes and ponds is problematic for many of the landless poor people whose livelihoods depend on fishing, particularly women. Government control of the lakes has not worked well for poor people. But would they fare any better if encouraged to manage the lakes themselves?

Innovative methods of transferring lease rights to secure access to water and food

Getting to the lakes

The Government of Bangladesh has managed inland fisheries by leasing lakes to fisher groups through annual auctions. However, the more wealthy and influential people in the community tended to monopolize these auctions.

This meant that most poor fishers worked as share-catchers, which limited their rights to only 25 per cent of their catch. Moreover, the lack of secure tenure from one year to the next meant that there was little incentive for anyone – lessees or share-catchers – to invest in the lakes. So they remained in a poor, often derelict condition, overgrown with water hyacinth. Productivity was low and the system of lake management did little to sustain and improve the livelihoods of poor people.

With World Bank support, the Government tried to improve the system by taking full control of some of the lakes in the 1980s. However, this approach proved to be unsustainable. It relied on continual maintenance and fish-stocking using government funds, and the management system was open to corrupt practices.

In 1989 IFAD initiated the Oxbow Lakes Small-Scale Fishermen Project, using a social fisheries approach, at 23 lakes in south-western Bangladesh. The project aimed to rehabilitate lake infrastructure and decentralize management of the resource by offering long-term leases to groups of poor fishers. In this way, they could invest with confidence in fish-stocking and in maintaining and improving lake infrastructure. Fishers formed various groups to assume the leases and manage the lakes – based on equal sharing of costs and benefits among members.

Setting up fisher groups

Security was a key to forming the groups – the security of 50-year leases increased the confidence of groups to invest in the lakes, and the security of individuals as members of a group, with equal rights and responsibilities, strengthened their confidence to participate. Transparent procedures enabled members to monitor key transactions, such as fish-stocking and sales, and ensured that new knowledge was not monopolized by a few but was spread widely throughout each group.

Membership was weighted in favour of poor fishers who already fished for a substantial period each year and had less than 0.4 hectare (ha) of land or a household income of below US$300 per year. Needless to say there were many local elite who tried to obstruct this process. Gradually, however, all but one of the lakes were successfully transferred to fisher groups – a process that took over two years to complete.

The project successfully established over 2,000 fisher groups of various sizes, involving some 45,000 fishers, as well as instigating major reforms in lake leasing arrangements. It was not without problems, however. There were many difficulties and delays in organizing leases and fees, solving social conflicts when forming groups, offering credit to groups without collateral, and providing adequate support for institutional and infrastructure development.

Nevertheless, the experience of mobilizing poor fishers, pioneering innovative methods of transferring lease rights to water bodies to fisher groups, and developing communal resource management systems proved to be invaluable – and replicable. To this end, a second IFAD-funded project was initiated in 1998 to ‘scale out’ the experience. It focused on community participation in order to ensure empowerment and access to water bodies. The project recruited national and local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to form new groups for 740 ha of lakes, and to strengthen the links between groups, line agencies, the private sector and NGOs in order to improve technology transfer and open access to markets.

Women assume more responsibility

Members of lake fisher groups in the first project were predominantly men, which obviously made it difficult to secure user rights for single, poor women. Although additional rules sought to encourage women’s participation, few groups successfully provided them with full access to inputs and benefits.

The second project specifically targeted women for household pond management, and, as a result, women effectively manage almost half the new pond fisher groups. Some 30 per cent are managed jointly by men and women and 25 per cent by men. Although the women-managed groups are in communities in which fish culture was not a regular male activity, this still represents an institutional shift in pond management.

Through their knowledge, labour, management, and ownership of capital, women established an ownership right over fish. Within the negotiated 20-year lease, men still own the ponds, but women now own the fish. “My husband cannot take fish from the pond”, says one participant, “if he wants fish, he must ask me, the fish are mine.”

There is now much value attached to women’s income-earning capability.

Women can practise pond management within the homestead and still maintain the traditions of purdah that require men to mediate with outsiders in the buying and selling of fish. This overcomes such concerns as “If we [women] sell in the market, it will affect our dignity”. The outcome is that women pond managers now have substantially more income and more influence over expenditure.

Families have benefited from this increased income and the new influences in the home, and communities are benefiting from the improved productivity of scarce resources.

A learning process

Although long-term leasing was a central feature of the first project, there are now doubts about pursuing leasing rather than user rights in subsequent activities. The concern is that if user rights are not protected, fisher groups might be subject to market pressures that would lead to takeovers by more powerful economic forces. This would defeat the poverty reduction objectives of the project.

Nevertheless, this pioneering experience in the fisheries sector has many lessons for the management of other common-pool resources. A leasehold forestry and forage development project was formulated for Nepal along similar principles. A comparison of the two experiences might eventually provide global lessons on the transfer of common-pool resources to group management systems.