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By Bernd Cordes, BCN Director[The scene: Fiji project representatives, led by Pio Radikedike, are leading representatives from two Solomon Islands and Indonesia projects through an example survey of the marine resources the Fiji team is monitoring. While counting the number of clams found within one quadrat along the trasect, a question is raised by Cliff Marlessey, a representative from the Indonesian team…]
Cliff: "…Wait a minute, Pio, I have to ask you something. Why don’t you monitor anything other than just these clams? At our project site in Irian Jaya, we count all kinds of things along our transects, like this seaweed here that you find with these clams. Why haven't you all done the same here in Fiji?"
Pio: "We don’t eat seaweed. But we do eat these clams… Does your team eat all the things they count?"
We all laughed. Pio's response was so straight-forward, so honest, and of course funny in its own way. But we also realized that his response was right… exactly right. In this one simple exchange, we recognized so many important messages: that communities can do their own resource use monitoring; that to do the monitoring, it has to be relevant to the community members themselves, useful for their lives and the decisions they make on a daily basis; and that bringing conservation practitioners - whether from villages or NGOs - together can, indeed, be a very valuable exercise. As Pio illustrated through his candid response, community-based project activities must useful to local residents in order such activities to be sustained locally over the long term.
Valuable enough, in fact, to bring together for the first time the three marine-based, BCN-funded projects in Indonesia, the Solomon Islands, and Fiji. From June 24 to June 30, the MacArthur Foundation, the University of the South Pacific (USP) and BCN provided the logistical and financial support to bring these three project teams together in Fiji, so allow the team members to share their experiences and lessons learned with one another in a workshop, to benefit from their interactions.
For the first three days of the workshop, the team representatives were hosted in beautiful Ucunivanua Village, one of the eight BCN-supported Verata project villages, located along the eastern cost of Viti Levu Island and about one hour from Fiji's Capital, Suva. The workshop participants worked long hours - broken up by huge meals, frequent kava drinking sessions, and unbelievably generous Fijian hospitality - to get a better understanding of the common conservation problems and opportunities each of the three projects face in the field.
The three teams, which included both community members and NGO staff from their respective project sites, also spent one clam, sunny morning in the ocean, watching as the Fiji team demonstrated their resource monitoring methods within an locally-managed protected area they established a few years ago. It was during this exercise that the telling dialogue between Cliff and Pio occurred. The marine monitoring demonstration was not only an opportunity for the Fijian team to show off their technical competence with their peers, but more importantly to compare different sampling designs and methodologies, as well as to get a better understanding for how the monitoring information can be used by local villages in resource decision making and how such groups are working with scientists to bridge the gap between "pure" science and "practical" science to encourage community-based marine resource sustainability.
On the fourth day of the workshop, the workshop team moved from Ucunivanua to USP campus in Suva, where the participants prepared two sets of presentations. The first set of presentations were basic orientations of the three projects and their project partners. The second set they prepared was more challenging. It was based on the results they had generated from their work in Ucunivanua to synthesize the important community-based marine conservation principles learned over the past three to four years. Key conclusions highlighted in this second set of presentations include: 1) communities can learn to monitor their own resources and that this process can be a powerful sustainability tool; 2) local leadership and clearly defined roles and responsibilities are critical at a project's start; and 3) to be viable in the long-term, local enterprises should be supported through a variety of funding mechanisms (e.g., loans and local contributions) rather than strictly grants.
On the fifth and final day, at the USP Marine Studies Lecture Hall the project teams presented their two sets of presentations to a crowd of broader conservation practitioners, academics, and government officials, outlining their principles and recommendations on how community-based marine conservation should proceed in the Western Pacific at the start of the upcoming millennium. For many of the participants that day, this was the first time they had made a formal presentation before such a large public audience, the first time interacting with the media… but nevertheless, their expertise and wealth of experience shined through and led to strong interest and support for their conclusions from all who were in attendance. Pio was later interviewed by the national Fijian television station, and several newspapers were present to write up articles in their papers' next day edition. In this regard, the project representatives acknowledged the value of the forum as both a communication vehicle to reach outside audiences and as an opportunity to experience the satisfaction and empowerment arising from the challenging task of publicly presenting the hard work that has been done for marine conservation.
But for many of the participants, they expressed that the primary value in the workshop was merely the opportunity to bring together people from different nations and cultures, to let their voices be heard by their neighbors doing similar work, and to discuss ideas and shared experiences. By the close of the workshop, new friendships were established, ongoing exchanges between these projects are now more likely to occur, and there was even discussion of expanding upon the work that has been done and develop a broader, collaborative core of projects and individuals that extends well beyond the BCN-funded activities in the South Pacific who are doing good work to conserve marine resources and habitats.
In short, there was a lot of interactive learning. As illustrated from the exchange between Pio and Cliff, this interaction has resulted in the development of principles for marine conservation that could apply to working with local communities in the Red Sea or the Florida Keys just as well as the South Pacific. It is BCN's hope that this type of interactive learning on sustainably managing the marine environment that will continue to occur and be communicated once BCN has ended in September 1999.
And by the way, a couple of us actually did try the seaweed found in the clam survey… there’s a good reason Fijians don’t eat a lot of it.
Press Release
Tuesday, June 29 1999
What steps can community-members take to manage their marine natural resources? This was the main question discussed at a meeting held today at the University of the South Pacific, Fiji.
The meeting brought together community representatives from projects in Indonesia, the Solomon Islands, and Tikina Verata here in Fiji. The groups met for three days in Tikina Verata to share their experiences and analyze their findings. The groups then came to present their results to government officials, conservation workers, researchers, and representatives of other villages.
In today's presentation, members of the different community groups first presented the basic results of their projects.
The Indonesian group told about their experiences setting up dive tourism businesses on small islands. Although they are facing many threats including bomb fishing and the construction of a large hotel, the community business are starting to promote conservation awareness.
The Solomon Islands group talked about their project setting up the first community-managed marine conservation area in their country and setting up a community fishery.
Finally, the Fiji project told the audience about their work in setting up a project that involves creating a deal between the local community and international drug companies interested in obtaining samples of different animals and plants to test them for their medicinal properties. The group focused on some of the exciting work that the community has been doing monitoring the results of their project and the marine protected area that they have established.
After the initial presentations, the groups then presented the results of their analyses over the past few days. They presented important principles that they developed by sharing and comparing their experiences. Key principles presented by the project representatives included: 1) local communities can manage their resources if they are given proper training, 2) biological monitoring can and should be done by the communities themselves, and 3) community-based fishery enterprises should be supported through a variety of funding sources, not being reliant upon either donor contributions or loans alone.
When asked what he appreciated most about his opportunity in sharing experiences and lessons with others in the Indo-Pacific doing locally-based marine conservation, Pio Radikedike from Tikina Verata said "I really liked the workshop - it really helped me learn things about other projects. It was also really great to have our chiefs participate and learn from the results." Chief Leslie Miki from Kia Village in the Solomon Islands added, "I think it is very important to share our differences between the projects, as well as the good side of them, so that we can better understand each other in our work."
"The workshop was interesting because it included people from the villages, people with limited education, and allowed their voices to be heard and to increase their knowledge and skills," said Pak Tera, who works in the Padaido Islands. Ibu Oemi, Pak Tera’s colleague, added, "It was very interesting because it gave us an opportunity to share our experiences, and from those experiences, we could develop ideas and principles for conservation."
Additional information on the workshop is available on the web at www.BCNet.org.
The three projects had been funded by the Biodiversity Conservation Network (BCN), a USAID-funded initiative managed through a partnership between the World Wildlife Fund, The Nature Conservancy, and World Resources Institute. BCN is studying what it has learned from the twenty project sites it has supported across Asia and the Pacific. As part of this effort, the BCN secured funds from the MacArthur Foundation to bring together these three marine conservation project communities in Fiji to compare their assumptions and less with those obtained through the over-arching BCN analysis.
The workshop was facilitated by the Institute of Applied Science at the University of the South Pacific. A video is available of the seminar.
Fiji Times, Wednesday June 23 1999
Villagers Work on Marine Project
By Litia Naigulevu
Villagers from the tikina of Verata in Tailevu have been engaging themselves in a marine conservation project for the past three years.
The project is one of 20 other projects initiated by the United States government carried out by the Biodiversity Conservation Network throughout Asia and the Pacific.
The Fiji project was organised by the University of the South Pacific, the Fiji government, and the South Pacific Action Committee for Human Ecology and the Environment.
USP Project co-ordinator Bill Aalbersberg said the project will end with a workshop from June 24-29, where participants from Verata will present their findings along with those from the Solomons and Indonesia.
"One of the ideas of the project is getting the decision making role down to the community level," he said.
"What's unique about this project is those presenting papers on marine conservation are not government people."
Professor Aalbersberg said the villagers from Verata had developed marine resource management plans which included bans on turtle killing and coral harvest.
"They've been very successful in Verata and they've developed what they will do to manage marine resources," he said.
"They have also declared some areas as taboo and they have seen a large increase in the kaikoso population."
Professor Aalbersberg said the villagers had also set up a marine bio-prospecting enterprise and have managed the proceeds through a trust fund.
"The idea of making money was for the community to set up an enterprise using their biological resources," Prof. Aalbersberg said.
"If you worked through the community, it's a more effective way of getting things done," he said.
The first four days of the workshop will take place in Ucunivanua, the chiefly village of Verata.
Representatives of the three Pacific projects will share their experiences and identify what they have learned. From these discussions, they will prepare presentations which they will deliver at the USP Science Lecure Theatre on Tuesday, June 29.
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