Community-based coral reef management in small islands: a social capital analysis

Abstract

Human activities including bomb and poison fishing and coral mining have threatened Indonesian coral reefs. Many programs have been promoted to alleviate the problem. The focus of social capital’s contribution to sustainable coral reef resource use has been given little attention. Social capital that defined as trust, norms of reciprocity, and networks is argued to facilitate the formation of collective action and institution, which may contribute to sustainable coral reef resource use. The study is carried out in five islands in South Sulawesi and analyses the state of coral reef, destructive fishing, and fishery sustainability. Three dimensions of social capital (i.e. bonding, bridging and linking social capital) are assessed, including the impact of social capital investment. It discusses institutional analysis of community-based institutional arrangements. Further, a simulation experiment of an agent-based modelling is made to understand dynamic impact of social capital on destructive fishing and fishery. Results show that bonding, bridging and linking social capital affect the formulation and enforcement of rules and institution at local level. Social capital investment – through networks, capacity and institution building – is a necessary condition for coral reef management, but not sufficient. Enforcing local rules requires credible commitment, but is difficult to attain because of the problem of fit between rules and resource system. When the community capacity and institution are weak, destructive fishing are proliferated, because social norms are not sufficiently strong to prevent widespread individual opportunism. The study recommends three aspects to achieve sustainable coral reef management: (1) to promote multi-scale governance that can link up different levels of management organization; (2) to improve fishers’ welfare through fulfillment of basic needs, to avert the use of destructive fishing tools for economic reason; (3) to increase disparities of fish price and production costs between fishing using destructive gears and those that do not.