Adaptive Co-Management: Lessons from Coastal Cambodia

Local level sustainability planning for livelihoods: A Cambodian experience

“…Less than 40% of households in Koh Sralao have lived in the community for ten years or more. Most households have learned to harvest various resources, after other income generating activities, such as charcoal production and shrimp farming, collapsed (Marschke and Nong 2003). This differs significantly from Kompong Phluk where almost all of the people have continued to live in the community (returning after the Khmer Rouge) and intend to stay.…”

“…Resources remained relatively abundant until the 1990s, but rapid resource declines since have greatly affected local livelihoods, thereby motivating villagers to 'do something'. We discuss elsewhere the experience in the Koh Sralao area of one project team mobilizing villagers around the issue of mangrove decline and how the use of this experience for adaptive co-management can be applied more generally (Marschke and Nong 2003). This is not to suggest that all villagers in the two communities are active in supporting the work of the resource management committees; participation does remain an issue.…”

“…In Kompong Phluk, the project team of the Participatory Natural Resource Management in the Tonle Sap Region project team has worked with villagers on resource management issues since the mid-1990s. Both areas are acknowledged as success stories for community-based management; other communities are not necessarily as well organized, interested or active (Evans 2002;Marschke and Nong 2003).…”

“…Perhaps the current crisis in the swimming crab fishery will lead to negotiated, incremental solutions, or alternatively a stock collapse will force a closure of the fishery. Either way, Koh Sralao's resource management committee is well situated to deal with the crisis because they will be able to apply their learning from previous crisis (Marschke and Nong 2003).…”

“…The approach of using unsustainability as the starting point has been used, among others, to analyze a case of acidified and disease-impacted crayfish lakes in Sweden (Olsson and Folke 2001), and a case in coastal Cambodia in which the evolution of adaptive co-management in a degraded mangrove ecosystem was traced (Marschke and Nong 2003). Adaptive co-management helps operationalize the dynamics of sustainability because it combines: (1) elements of adaptive management or learning-by-doing (Holling 1978), and (2) elements of co-management, or the sharing of management power and responsibility between government agencies and local communities (Olsson et al 2004).…”