Abstract:
Many fisheries authorities in the world have been compelled to accept community-based management
as an invaluable means to formulate fisheries management due to failures of small-scale fisheries
exclusively managed by centralized units. Beach seine fishing practices in Sri Lanka are known to be
institutionalized by traditional community-based coastal fisheries management systems. Eight beach
seine fisher communities in southern Sri Lanka were studied, using standard ethnographic methods, to
ascertain and document the rules and norms that are in general not formerly codified in writing, and
evaluate empirically the compliance of institutional arrangements with Ostrom's modified design
principles for long enduring common pool resources (CPR) management systems. Fishing rights were
vested to the villagers as a residential proximity right. Due to this tradition, ownership of a beach seine
and fishing rights at fishing territory vested them as; exclusive, primary or secondary rights. The sole
authority for governing CPR was vested to community organization termed “madel samithi” (beach seine
society), which can be treated as the local administrative unit. Institutions governing the CPR addressed
the excludability problem by defining fishing territory, eligibility rules and intercommunity access rule,
while subtractability problem was addressed by gear rules, temporal allocation rules, first comer rules,
fishing behaviour rules, conservation rules, and rules for distribution of benefits. The study highlighted
that institutional architecture of beach seine fishery of southern Sri Lanka comprised all modified design
principles and, 90.9% of those exhibited higher compliance (54.5% e high compliance and 36.4% e very
high compliance) with modified design principles. Higher compliance of institutional arrangements with
modified design principles indicates robust and stable self-governing institutions. Beach seine fishing in
southern Sri Lanka is therefore an example for community-based coastal fisheries management system
that relies on strong, locally crafted rules as well as evolved norms, where institutional and governance
mechanisms have essentially averted the tragedy, providing significant contribution to coastal economy.
Study provides the starkness to the notion that local actors in tropical community-based marine resource
systems overcome the CPR dilemmas through robust self-governing institutions.
