Fisheries Management in the Pacific: Tradition and the Challenges of Development in Marovo, Solomon Islands

This paper, a commissioned study under the UNRISD Research Programme on Sustainable
Development Through People’s Participation in Resource Management, examines a case of traditional fisheries-related resource management; a case in which local people, from a basis of traditional, “common property” control over the sea and its resources handle a multitude of development issues. Presenting first some important issues relating to people’s role in fisheries management and to the “common property” debate, we then describe a traditional system for management of land and sea resources in a Pacific Islands society--that of Marovo Lagoon, Solomon Islands. Emphasis is given to fisheries resources, with a view to explaining in practical terms how the customary marine tenure system operates under the social, political, economic and ecological circumstances of change arising from development pressures. Against this background, assessments are made of the viability of this traditional fisheries management system under present conditions of centralized political control and of both external and internal pressures for large-scale resource development enterprises.