Exploring the agentic power in fishery: reflections from fishing communities of Lake Tanganyika, Kigoma, Tanzania
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RESEARCH
Exploring the agentic power in fishery: reflections from fishing communities of Lake Tanganyika, Kigoma, Tanzania Gideon Silvester Bulengela 1
&
Paul O. Onyango 1 & Joan M. Brehm 1
Received: 25 May 2018 / Accepted: 11 September 2019 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract One of the central concerns of fisheries management is to understand the dynamics in the human-environment interactions especially in the context of the observed declining fish resources. This paper examines how agentic power drives the humanenvironment interactions. Drawing on interviews with fishers from Lake Tanganyika in Kigoma, Tanzania, the paper demonstrates how fishers negotiate their ways out of the structured rules and regulations to be able to access and benefit from the Lake’s fish resources. Actors in the study areas maneuvered their way through the externally driven and established rules and regulations set to manage the fisheries. Thus, instead of actors being passive recipients of these external rules and regulations, they actively engage with them and challenge those that affect or contradict with community values and norms, which enable access to fish resources. It is therefore argued that actors are capable of negotiating their ways to access fish resources, even in the face of institutional structures that would otherwise impede these efforts. Their power to invent new possibilities to respond to problematic situations needs to be acknowledged by resource managers as they seek alternative approaches to future fishery management strategies. Keywords Fisheries management . Fisheries . Agentic power . Lake Tanganyika
Introduction Common-pool resources, such as fisheries, pose complex challenges to sustainable management for the future. Jentoft and Chuenpagdee (2009) argue that these challenges and/or problems are “wicked”—complex, tricky, and thorny. Wicked in the sense that they are “not solved once and for all but pose a constant challenge” (Jentoft and Chuenpagdee 2009, p. 553). The problems are tricky and not obviously clear as one may think. This argument is founded on the reality that one cannot say with certainty that “this is the problem.” This assertion is true and evident in the current status of many smallscale fisheries, especially those in developing countries. For example, understanding the increase in effort in fishing which reduces fish stocks has no simple or single answer. In the context of Tanzania, for example, authorities cannot reduce fishing effort by reducing the number of licenses issued as this
* Gideon Silvester Bulengela [email protected] 1
University of Dar es Salaam, Dare es Salaam, Tanzania
would likely lead to fishers simply going to fish without them (Obiero et al. 2015). Quotas are also challenging to introduce, as effective monitoring of compliance to their allocation would simply be hard to achieve. Globally, different management strategies have been employed in an attempt to manage fisheries sustainably. These strategies range from centralized
