Applying sustainability assessment thinking to a community-governed development: a sea cucumber farm in Madagascar

Abstract

Sustainability assessment thinking is now well established in the impact assessment literature. Community-governed developments which aim to be sustainable have become popular in many developing countries. They attempt to protect the environment while alleviating poverty, but there is apparently no systematic guidance. We explored how established sustainability assessment criteria might be combined with principles for good community-governance for application to a community governed development using a case study of a sea cucumber farm in Madagascar. By adapting these criteria and principles to our case study, we were able to quickly and easily illuminate important sustainability issues and provide insight for improving processes and outcomes. We believe that our framework for combining these two sets of criteria and principles provides a simple but useful approach that could help future community groups enhance their quest for sustainable development.

Keywords:

• sustainability assessment
• community governance
• sustainable development
• multi-criteria assessment
• sea cucumber farming

Introduction

To our knowledge sustainability assessment (SA), which aims to ensure environmental, social and economic well-being and seeks to increase net sustainability, has not been applied to community-governed developments which aim to be sustainable. Community governance has become a widespread concept and many examples of such developments with the aim of promoting sustainability are available from around the globe – for example fisheries in Bangladesh (Thompson et al. 2003), forest management in Canada and Cameroon (Alemagi 2010) and tourism developments in Botswana (Sebele 2010). They are particularly prevalent in developing countries, where such projects aim to alleviate poverty while protecting the environment (Wells & McShane 2004).

The idea that sustainable development should be achieved via community initiatives or ideas became popular in the wake of the United Nations conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janerio in 1992 (Ghai 1994). Governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) argued for co-management of natural resources between national and local governments, NGOs and local communities (Adams & McShane 1992; Holmberg et al. 1993; Berkes 1995 etc.). However, reports describing the failure to achieve sustainable outcomes of some of these developments have surfaced (e.g. Hughes & Flintan 2001; Wells & McShane 2004; Chan et al. 2007; Sebele 2010). Some failures have been attributed to projects being too short term (Western et al. 1994), an overreliance on expatriate expertise (Western et al. 1994; Sebele 2010), over-ambitious expectations and problematic implementation (Wells & McShane 2004).

It would appear that SA could aid such developments and help ensure that sustainability goals are met. SA is frequently based on a set of criteria and one of the more widely accepted sets of criteria is that of Gibson et al. (2005), also found in Gibson (2006), as demonstrated by their uptake by other impact assessment practitioners (e.g. Cravo & Partidário 2011; Morrison-Saunders & Retief 2012; Péti 2012; Lamorgese & Geneletti 2013). The Gibson SA criteria are grouped under eight headings1 and are designed to be adapted on a case by case basis. For example, Gaudreau and Gibson (2010) integrated the eight criteria with those for resilience and applied them to a case study of a Biofuels project in Barbados, their aim being to illustrate how integration of two fields could aid in the assessment of one undertaking.

Our aim was to integrate the Gibson et al. (2005) criteria for SA with criteria for good community governance to explore how sustainability assessment thinking might provide a useful tool for community-governed developments. Our approach was based on a literature review combined with a case study approach to help conceptualize and evaluate the theory as well as to identify strengths and weaknesses (e.g. Flyvbjerg 2011).

A sea cucumber farm in Madagascar was selected as the case study (Box 1) on the basis that it is similar to many other community-governed projects in the developing world in that it was initiated and is co-managed by a conservation NGO operating in the area (e.g. Wells & McShane 2004; Ebling & Yasué 2009; Sebele 2010). One of the authors had previously worked at the pilot study for the sea cucumber farms, allowing personal insights to inform our analysis. Additionally the case study has been operational for several years and documentation and information on the project are widely available.

Box 1. Overview of the sea cucumber farm in MadagascarContextMadagascar is a developing nation with some 69% of the population living below the national poverty line and 90% living on less than US$2 a day (World Bank 2011). The main source of income is agriculture (including forestry and fishing), with fishing being one of the major exports. The arid climate of southwest Madagascar prevents any sort of farming and communities are isolated owing to poor transportation and communication (BV 2012). However, the Grand Récif de Tulear barrier coral reef running 450 km along the coast provides a variety of marine life, representing the main income opportunity (Harris 2007). In response to declining wild fishing harvests, largely owing to a switch from subsistence to market-driven fishing and increased populations, initiatives to reduce the environmental impact of fishing while providing income for local communities have been undertaken with the aid of NGOs (Harris 2007). One of these undertakings is sea cucumber farming. Following a pilot study in 2007, six farms were implemented in southwest Madagascar in 2009. By 2010 four of these sites had been abandoned owing to poor results (BV 2012). One of the farms still operating is located in the village of Tampolove (population 800 people) and is the case study for our research.CharacteristicsThe sea cucumber farm in Tampolove employs 20 farming teams with an average of four people per team. Each team manages one pen and 52% of the team members are women (BV 2012). Earnings from the farm are split between all the individuals in each farming team and the entire community benefits from the earnings of a school pen which provides tuition for the children in the community (Antoine Rougier, personal communication, 24 April 2012).When the Tampolove farm was first established, the NGO consulted the community and conducted surveys to determine potential farm families. By this time the NGO had been operating in the community for several years and a bond of trust had been established between the community of Tampolove and the NGO (Antoine Rougier, personal communication, 24 April 2012).The first sale took place in 2011 and it was largely seen as a success. However, Robinson and Pascal (2009) reported that the expected revenue was lower than anticipated owing to poor juvenile sea cucumber survival rates and theft of adult sea cucumbers. Techniques for increasing juvenile survival have since been developed with improved transportation of juveniles to site, the introduction of nursery pens, and predation prevention (BV 2012). As a result, the rate of juvenile survival has risen from 46% in February 2009 to a peak of 76.9% in August 2011 (BV 2012). Increased night guarding of the sea cucumber pens has also been implemented to discourage theft of adult sea cucumbers. Problems observed at other sites in the region where communities lost interest in the farms owing to the slow initial grow-out rate of sea cucumbers farmed (6–12 months) have been avoided in Tampolove by staggering the introduction of juveniles. As such, a source of income can be provided throughout the year.

Criteria for sustainability assessment of community governed developments

Criteria provide a basis to set goals against, enable progress to be measured and serve as an early warning system. We used generic sets of criteria for SA and good community governance, thus our method is similar to that of Morrison-Saunders and Hodgson (2009), Gaudreau and Gibson (2010) and Lamorgese and Geneletti (2013) in terms of adapting and combining sets of criteria for a specific context. We adapted the two sets of criteria for the case study context. Application of the criteria to the case study was based exclusively on a desk top analysis.

As explained previously, we used the eight SA criteria established by Gibson et al. (2005) in our study. To derive good community governance principles, we reviewed recent publications on theory and practice.

Generic criteria for good community governance

Mckieran et al. (2000) describe community governance as collaboration (people working together to solve problems), while Totikis et al. (2005) define it as decision-making being carried out by, with or on behalf of a community. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP 1997) established a set of principles defining good community governance addressing issues such as fairness and equity, so that all men and women in the community should have their voices heard. Graham et al. (2003) also identified fairness and equity aspects as being central to successful community governance, pointing out the need to respect the rights and traditional knowledge of local people. They concluded that a universal set of principles for defining good governance can be established, but these principles need to be adapted to the specific context to prove useful. The UNDP (1997) also addressed the issue of accountability, that decision-makers are accountable to the public and that the decision-making process needs to be transparent. Similarly, the Australian Department of Aboriginal Affairs (DAA) (2009), established a set of five criteria for application in aboriginal communities, addressing the issue of accountability by stating that persons speaking on the behalf of the community are accountable to the entire community. We combined the thinking on good community governance from these sources into three generic principles (Table 1).

Table 1 Principles for good community governance

Collaboration	People working together. Everyone in the community has a voice
Fairness and Equity	All men and women are involved in the decision-making process. Delegates for the community talk on behalf of the whole community
Accountability	Decision-makers and community representatives are accountable to the community and the decision-making process is transparent.

Operational goals for the sea cucumber farm

In considering how the generic good community governance principles in Table 1 might be applied to the sea cucumber farm, we drew upon available documentation for the case study, including both design considerations (e.g. Robinson & Pascal 2009) and reports evaluating actual farm implementation to date (e.g. Tsiresy et al. 2011; BV 2012). From this we were able to identify the main environmental, social and economic goals of the sea cucumber farm (Table 2). We acknowledge that this was a retrospective development and desk-top-based application of sustainability assessment thinking to our case study, that is, in a similar fashion to Gaudreau and Gibson's (2010) application of SA and resilience criteria for a biofuels operation in Barbados. While the NGO co-managing the Tampolove sea cucumber farm has spent a great deal of time on stakeholder/community consultation, involvement and cooperation, we relied upon reported accounts of this and did not undertake any consultation of our own. Ideally, of course, development of SA and good community governance criteria would occur in advance of project design and development, and with appropriate stakeholder input (otherwise the principles espoused in Table 1 would themselves be violated).

Table 2 Operational goals for the sea cucumber farm in Tampolove

Environmental	Halt over-exploitation of wild stocks of sea cucumbers
	Increase wild stocks of sea cucumbers and fish
Social	Provide employment and income for the community
	Provide education for the children of the community
Economic	Provide an alternative income to fishing
	Provide economic growth of the community
Source: derived from Robinson and Pascal (2009), Tsiresy et al. (2011) and BV (2012).

The operational goals in Table 2 underpin the more specific criteria that we developed for the sea cucumber case study through combining SA criteria and good community governance principles.

Combining SA criteria and good community governance principles

As an initial step, following the example from Gaudreau and Gibson (2010), we developed questions for sustainability and community governance specific to the case study for each of the generic criteria (Table 3). The questions were developed to ensure that all aspects of the farm operations and impacts would be covered. Each of these open questions elicits a response that may be positive or negative. For the farm to progress towards sustainability, positive responses are desirable and the purpose of these questions is to guide decisions towards positive/enhancement outcomes. In practical applications of this method (i.e. pro-actively, before development commences), where a negative response is initially obtained to a question, there would be opportunity to consider mitigation and project design measures that might be invoked in order to enhance the sustainability performance potential. There is obvious resonance between our good community governance principles in Table 1 and the Gibson SA criteria relating to equity and governance. By combining these two sets, with full cognizance of the operational goals of the sea cucumber farm (Table 2), we intended to shape an approach to sustainability assessment thinking that would be directly suited to a community governed scenario (Table 3).

Table 3 Case-specific questions and key results for generic criteria

Socio-ecological system integrity
How does the farm affect: Natural habitats and fauna and their ability to provide ecosystem service? The capacity of maintaining the project into the future?	Construction of pens	−
	Competition for space and resources	−
	Active removal of predators	−
	Genetic diversity loss, introduction of disease and parasites	=
	Increased earnings and new financial system	+
Livelihood sufficiency, opportunity and inclusivity
How does the farm affect: Income and employment in the community? Education and training for the community? Health of the community?	Potential for increased capacity and employment	+
	Farming education provided by NGO	+
	School farming team provides school tuition	+
	Health issues from farming are no different to traditional fishing	=
Inragenerational equity and accountability
How does the farm affect: Wealth distribution within the community and in the region? Gender and age equity? Decision-making and accountability?	Wealth not spread throughout the region	−
	Equal opportunity for farming within the community	+
	Less fortunate benefit through school tuition scholarships	+
	Equal opportunity for men and women	+
	School involvement ensures gender equity	+
	Community input guided by NGO	+
Intergenerational equity
How does the farm affect: Future income and employment? Wild sea-cucumber stock numbers? Income generation alternative to fishing? Product demand?	Potential for future increased profitability and employment	+
	Future potential to reduce wild stock harvesting in Tampolove	+
	High wild stock harvesting in neighbouring communities	−
	High demand	+
Resource maintenance and efficiency
How does the farm affect: Resource (sea-cucumber) impacts? Net energy usage? Net material usage?	Harvest post-reproductive stage, potential for re-stocking of wild sea cucumbers	+
	Energy and material use similar to traditional fishing practices	=
Socio-ecological civility and democratic governance
How does the farm affect: Social awareness and ecological awareness of the community? Community capacity?	High social and ecological awareness	+
	Potential for community to run farm without NGO support	+
Precaution and Adaptation
How does the farm affect: Damage compared with traditional fishing practices? Ability to monitor any changes?	No local scale monitoring of potential environmental damage from farm	−
Intermediate and long-term integration, and future demands
How do the interrelations among the farm's effects influence: Capacity to deliver desirable effects? Ability to increase desirable effects? Ability to reverse adverse effects? The ability to adapt for future demands and population growth?	Social and economic benefits	+
	No decrease in fishing	−
	Increased protected (no fishing) areas	+
	Lack of monitoring of environmental impacts	−
	Potential growth limited owing to space requirements	−
	Inability to keep up with future population growth	−

Application of criteria to case study

We answered each of the questions using available information and our previous knowledge on the case study. As previously pointed out, a more rigorous application would require interviews and site surveys, something not available to us at this point. However, sufficient information was available for an initial survey into the applicability of sustainability assessment thinking for community governed developments. While Gaudreau and Gibson (2010) held some informal interviews for their study of the Barbados biofuel development, it was largely based on available documentation. They were able to successfully apply sustainability–resilience criteria, stating their case without formal interviews, something we were also able to achieve.

The information we gathered for each of the questions is also summarized in Table 3 using the three-point scoring system used by Gaudreau and Gibson (2010). We ranked the farm's contribution to sustainability with a (+) for positive impacts and a ( − ) for negative impacts; and impacts that are mixed or that may be positive or negative depending on the implementation were ranked ( = ). This scoring system serves to reveal areas of strength and weakness.

Utility of sustainability assessment for community-governed developments approach

Context-specific application of criteria has been identified as one of the strengths of sustainability assessment (e.g. Gibson et al. 2005; Gibson 2006; Bond & Morrison-Saunders 2009, 2010), so it is perhaps no surprise that application to our case study was straight forward. We found that, by extending sustainability assessment thinking to incorporate good community governance principles, the sustainability of the case study could quickly be evaluated, and it was ensured that social issues were well represented in the assessment. We were keen to avoid a possible over-emphasis on environmental aspects, something that (Ness et al. 2007) observed in previous sustainability assessments.

Similarly to the Gaudreau and Gibson (2010) report, we found that our method illuminated issues and gave insight regarding areas for improvement, as well as drawing attention to interrelated issues (environmental, social and economic). We also found our assessment to provide important insight in a short timeframe. Even with the limitation of not involving stakeholders, we were able to highlight positive performances as well as point out areas were the objective of sustainability was not being met.

With respect to the case study itself, it became evident that the community has benefited from the farm in the form of employment and an additional income source. The social well-being of the community has also improved through the provision of school tuition for children from low-income families from the earnings of the school farming team. Areas requiring attention were also pinpointed by our assessment. The key issues (evident in Table 3), were found to be threefold: (1) the environmental effects of the farm are poorly monitored and as such poorly understood; (2) the benefits from the farm are not spread throughout the region; and (3) while there is some potential for future growth of the farm, it is unlikely that it will be able to keep up with future population growth.

Perhaps the most pressing issue is that of environmental impacts – the impacts of the farm are poorly understood and as such socio-ecological integrity cannot be guaranteed under current operational arrangements. To better understand the environmental effects of farming, we would suggest that environmental monitoring be undertaken to complement the social and economic monitoring already in place. This would ensure that an integrated approach can be pursued, with net gains in all areas (environmental, social and economic). Secondly, the aims of halting overharvesting and increasing numbers of wild sea cucumbers are hampered by the uneven profitability from the farm. While the community of Tampolove may see reduced wild harvesting, neighbouring communities are still heavily utilizing this resource. Similarly, if the farm is unable to provide employment and earnings for populations into the future, it is likely that the community will have to fall back on wild harvesting again, compromising the aim of halting overexploitation and increasing wild stock numbers.

The combined set of criteria for sustainability assessment and good community governance, when adapted to the context of the case study, provided a useful tool in pinpointing strengths and weaknesses. While a more rigorous approach would involve stakeholders and be applied at the onset of a development, our method quickly illuminated sustainability issues, providing a basis for improvements. As such, by applying sustainability assessment thinking to community-governed developments, a useful tool guiding decision-making towards sustainability can be provided, increasing the chance of success.

Acknowledgements

Our thanks go out to Blue Ventures, and in particular Antoine Rougier, for providing us with information and documentation related to our case study.

Notes

^1. The Gibson SA criteria relate to: Socio-ecological system integrity; Livelihood sufficiency and opportunity; Intragenerational equity; Intergenerational equity; Resource maintenance and efficiency; Socio-ecological civility and democratic governance; Precaution and Adaptation; and Immediate and long-term integration.