Defragmenting resource management on the southeast arm of Lake Malawi: Case of fisheries

Abstract

The southeast arm of Lake Malawi catchment has a wide range of natural resources that require prudent management for sustainability and maximisation of benefits. The current management practice is government sector based, with individual Departments and Ministries using their own policies, legislations and management approaches, yet dealing with the same composite resource and user communities. This has resulted in fragmentation of management leading to the lack of alignment between formal and informal institutions, and competition for power and authority for management. Fragmentation is also leading to loss of resource rent. This article analyses how and why management is fragmented in the southeast arm of Lake Malawi catchment and suggests how management could be defragmented, with special interest on fisheries. Activities with high negative impacts on fisheries include: overfishing; soil erosion resulting in siltation and turbidity of the lake; chemical and organic pollution; loss of access to land and beaches; and habitat loss. There is need for a better and more holistic understanding of how human activities represent both livelihood benefits and a threat to sustainability of natural resources to find ways for balancing these two aspects. We suggest that to increase the efficacy of management of Lake Malawi's southeast arm will require ‘defragmented decentralization’, an approach whereby devolution of authority and responsibility are ceded to the district and local levels, respectively.

Keywords:

• institutions
• fragmentation
• defragmented decentralisation
• devolution

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments on the previous versions of the manuscript.

Notes

¹ On the problem of scale in the management of environmental resources see Holling (1995), Lemos and Agrawal (2006), Cash et al. (2006), Berkes (2007).

² Social-Ecological System is used in the same sense as in Ostrom, Janssen, and Anderies (2007).

³ A reflective and flexible approach to progressive problem solving that is led by facilitators to improve the way issues are addressed or problems solved.

⁴ These reviews have been reported in Donda et al. (2014).

⁵ This regulation, mandated by the Town and Country Planning Act (GoM 1991), was put in place in order to allow the public and communities access to and use of beaches for fishing and domestic purposes. However, some cottage owners fence their plots to maintain privacy and for security purposes.

⁶ Cleaver (2002) uses the term ‘bricolage’ to refer to “how mechanisms for resource management and collective action are borrowed or constructed from existing institutions, styles of thinking and sanctioned social relationships” (p. 16). Also, this concept argues that existing arrangements are usually adapted for multiple purposes, are embedded in networks of social relations, norms and practices, and in which maintaining social consensus and solidarity may be equally important as optimum resource management outcomes (p. 17).

Additional information

Funding

This study was made possible through the European Union funding (project AFS/2009/219017) through the African Caribbean and Pacific Science and Technology Programme (Europe Aid/127860/D/ACT/ACP). The contents of this article are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not reflect the views of the European Union. We thank all stakeholders and participants who generously donated their time to the study.