SUBJECT: Local biodiversity and conservation conflicts.
AUTHOR: Sandra Bell
DATE: 2nd April 2003

KEYWORDS: Fishing, local knowledge, cultural and societal issues, conservation conflict.

SUMMARY: The author argues the fact that the reluctance of local people to conserve biodiversity in wetland areas may be due to confusion caused by legislation and legislation implementation and the feeling that their knowledge, as well as cultural and societal traditions are not being taken into consideration in the biodiversity conservation decision-making process.


To move from cheese to fish, one of the factors that is emerging from our research on the 5th Framework Project "Integrated Management of European Wetlands" is not so much the reluctance of local people to make efforts towards conservation of biodiversity as the confusing raft of legislation and the many bodies that are supposed to oversee and implement that legislation.

Local people also feel that they have not been consulted about the formulation of the rules that they are supposed to abide by and their own environmental knowledge is overlooked.

As far as fishing is concerned some people have a deep and personally felt relationship with the waters that they fish and the species that they capture. There are often social and cultural meanings attached to fishing which make it a focus of local identity. In these circumstances, many local people feel that they should be treated differently to "outsiders". They also often feel that regulations created by people they perceive as distant bureaucrats, be they at national or EU level, have no real meaning for them. Sometimes they break the rules in order to flout what they see as interference.

We find that although people express concern for the state of the fish stocks they also feel that they have a right to exploit the products of their own waters. Regulation of commercial fishers is more acceptable, but when local people want to take fish for their own consumption they feel it is their right to do so even at times of the year when fishing in banned. This is just as true in places where people can afford to buy non-local fish as in places where the fresh water fishery is a vital source of household subsistence.

A contribution by:

Sandra Bell
University of Durham
Department of Anthropology
43 Old Elvet
Durham DH1 3HN, UK