Every community-based marine resource management (CBMRM) inherently takes place in a highly complex social-ecological environment, and stakeholder perceptions related to various aspects of the natural and social environment guide behavior in every stage of the management process. This paper provides an introduction to the psychology of perception with regard to marine resource management. In particular, it offers a typology of CBMRM relevant perceptions along with an analysis of psychological, societal, and physical factors that modulate them. Based on this analysis, we propose the introduction of specially trained local Perception Experts (PE's), whose role will be to recognize and reflect individual perceptions of involved stakeholders, and to communicate them at community meetings where decisions are made. This empirically testable addition to current CBMRM schemes could help to increase participation, develop management measures that fit the capacities of the involved stakeholders more accurately, and hence, contribute to a faster rehabilitation of marine resources.

a b s t r a c tThis paper arises from a four-year Indonesian-German research cooperation on the governance and management of Indonesian coastal and marine ecosystems. Project objectives were to investigate coastal and marine social-ecological dynamics and feedbacks and to analyse socio-political and institutional structures and processes in order to support adaptive coastal governance. Participating researchers worked in the Spermonde Archipelago, off South Sulawesi, Indonesia, between 2007 and 2010. Methods included ship-based research excursions, several classical surveys, anthropological participant observation, and participatory research methods applied by an interdisciplinary social-natural science team. This paper summarises our findings and draws policy conclusions. First, we discuss Marine Protected Areas and participation focussing on local "rules-in-use". In addition, reef exploitation and local livelihoods, in particular fisheries and mariculture, and the existing social networks and hierarchies in fisheries are explored to understand social vulnerability, resilience and marine resource governance in the context of the Spermonde Archipelago. An outline of major policy recommendations concludes this article.

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The time-tested Indigenous fishing knowledge (IFK) of Fiji and the Pacific Islands is seriously threatened due to the commercialization of fishing, breakdown of traditional communal leadership and oral knowledge transmission systems, modern education, and the movement of the younger generations to urban areas for work and/or study. Consequently, IFK, which has been orally transmitted for generations, has either been lost, not learned by the current generation, or remains undocumented. This study focuses on the critical need to conserve and include IFK as a basis for assessing the conservation status of ecologically and culturally keystone fisheries species as a basis for planning site-specific management of marine and freshwater fisheries in Fiji and the Pacific Islands. The study reviews studies of the last two and a half centuries on IFK from Fiji and elsewhere in the small oceanic islands of the Pacific, as a basis for the conservation, documentation and intergenerational transfer of this knowledge as the foundation for sustainable fisheries management. The study also reviews: the nature and conservation status of IFK, itself; and the conservation status of species considered to be of particular ecological and cultural importance; reasons for the loss of species/taxa and associated knowledge and practices; and actions that can be taken to address this loss.

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