Document(s) 12 of 13

This volume's introduction strongly emphasised the need for a flexible management approach. The Caribbean represents a highly diversified and fragmented context, both at the ecological and cultural levels, and it is not characterised by a long tradition of community-based management. Deeply influenced by the processes that took place during the colonisation period, Caribbean societies are now fully engaged in the processes of globalisation, and both phenomena continue to have strong impacts on heterogeneity. While these phenomena are not particular to the Caribbean, through time they have acquired some specificity that constitutes an important independent variable for any researcher interested in the identification of relevant issues on coastal management in the region. However, this task is not easy: there is a complexity of resilient forms arising from the colonial past which has resulted in a mix of cultures and institutions, as well as various groups of stakeholders. All have recently been influenced by simultaneous globalisation and decentralisation trends.

This concluding chapter attempts to build on the previous comparative case studies pinpointing how a local-community approach to management still remains critically important, in spite of the precedence and resurgence of protectionist approaches for conservation. Eco-regional planning, ecosystembased management, and transboundary protected areas can be considered as possible paths to implementation. However, they must be considered within a series of approaches, among which community and participation remain central precepts for conservation (Brosius and Russel 2003). Given the expanding literature on these alternatives, partly explored in the introduction to this volume, we do not intend to fully enter into the debates and discussions that emerged from it. Instead, we rely on the ethnography that precedes (chapters 3 through 7), and we present concrete examples from which readers can draw their opinions and experiences.

We start with a discussion of analytical issues, paying attention to various forms of resilience that might influence collective action. However, we emphasise that, despite sharing similarities at the analytical level, these forms entail diverse research strategies and mobilisation efforts. This is particularly true in a context where a strong tradition in CBCRM does not exist. The relationship between communities' diversity and the larger institutions into which they are embedded in a governance perspective follows, with an emphasis on a flexible and cross-scale approach to management.

This section ends with some remarks on the lack of critical analysis of epistemology linked to coastal management. We then proceed to an examination of a series of variables stemming from the comparison of previous case studies, pinpointing some lessons that have been learnt during Phases I and II of the IDRC-CBCRM Caribbean programme. Finally, we draw a series of recommendations aimed at researchers and decision makers involved in the management of coastal areas, hoping to influence their future management interventions in this region.

Rethinking Analytical and Methodological Issues

One challenge that we better understood during the course of our analyses was the lack of a typology or integrated research framework within which to frame these analyses. We initially thought that the existing literature offered enough insights into these questions to allow us to develop such a framework. However, we now realise that at best there exists a mixture of papers on resilience theory, and others on participation and interdisciplinarity. Few make the linkages to each other and to coastal management—and almost none do so in the Caribbean. Therefore, we had to work from a very mixed bag of theory that made it extremely challenging to have an overall, agreed-upon framework for all projects. We believe that more cross-analysis of the various interconnecting schools of thought is needed so as to develop a more broadly based framework that can guide future research in the Caribbean.

Resilience factors in Caribbean coastal management

There has recently been a surge of interest in the importance of resilience— that is, the ability of systems to buffer change. Heterogeneity (in both cultural and ecological systems) is seen by many as one of the most important factors in promoting this. An improved understanding of the concept and how it played out in the Caribbean context was a central factor guiding much of our research. Resilience exists in many forms, and this work has clearly only scratched the surface in looking at these details.

In studying cultural systems that interact with ecological systems, a better understanding of individual-, household- and community-level issues is needed. Such issues are complex. They include how fishers organise their time, not only around different types of fishing (which may vary by season, species sought, or gear used) but also by integration with other livelihoods; according to seasonal migration, following the movement of selected fish stocks; by involvement of different members of the family or extended family; and according to historical knowledge and roles. Clearly, we do not understand the various forms of organisation and the choices individuals and groups make on the use of their time. Building on past and present knowledge systems is crucial. Indigenous knowledge and values, as well as other forms of traditional knowledge, continue to exist and play a role. In the cases examined during this research, Belize, Guatemala, and Panama provide particularly good examples of this reality.

The absence of a significant CBCRM tradition in the Caribbean is a phenomenon often mentioned in the previous chapters of this volume. However, its absence does not mean that CBCRM cannot be consolidated in the future. Despite colonisation's strong negative impact on native communities, contrary to what has been assumed by several authors, indigenous cultural features and institutions were not entirely eliminated. Chapter 3 makes this point very clearly. Some indigenous communities, such as the Kuna and Garifuna, have lost some of their pristine elements. However, they have been able to adjust to new contexts while maintaining some form of cultural continuity, either at the techno-economic, linguistic, and/or religious level. In general, the loss of key heterogeneity factors takes place in centralised management contexts (Berkes and Folke 2002). This represents a challenge in developing a more community-based approach. Unfortunately, our research was unable to probe this set of issues adequately. We were unable to provide further clarity on what might be in danger of being lost when local management is supplanted by more central management.

Similar remarks can be made for other ethnic groups who migrated to the area, even though the colonisation processes undermined and destabilised their previous socioeconomic organisation. In other words, if these longterm interactions have generated a significant cultural hybridisation and weakened previous mechanisms of community-based organisation, they also allowed the experimentation and consolidation of new organisational devices at the economic and institutional levels. Resilience factors, in which heterogeneity is a salient characteristic, are an inherent component of Caribbean peoples' use of their coastal areas, and they should represent key markers in the research and intervention efforts here. The important point, at the analytical level, is that different forms of resilience must be taken into account. That is the why the implementation of a CBCRM approach in the Caribbean is a difficult process.

These case studies illustrate this point very clearly. Without making an exhaustive review of current management problems in the region, the chapters in this volume nevertheless emphasise that the same problem can be dealt with in various ways according to the local context. The importance we give to this level of explanation (with its ecological and social components) is not rooted in an absolute faith in CBCRM approaches. Instead, in several cases, it stresses that prior knowledge of local institutional constraints and users' behaviour is a critical requirement for management problems to be solved.

Resilience, however, can also refer to the notion of "epistemic communities" (Jones 2004) whose membership largely bypasses a given socio-spatial unit. Around a particular management issue, individuals with diverse backgrounds and status can develop a shared focus leading to a gradual understanding of their different perceptions and values. Local actors are often obliged to deal with individuals who belong to research centres, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), or government agencies. These intermediate and cross-scale levels of interaction, in which the bureaucracy plays a central role, are often characterised by different types of resilience. If we define the latter as the people's capacity to maintain some form of continuity within a previously changing situation, we must admit that in general, both science and bureaucracy (which is management by the state) are characterised by less 'flexible responses'. In general, their practices and orientations are conditioned by stochastic and formalist models; within institutional contexts these are more oriented towards the future than the past. If we add to this their reliance on different forms of knowledge for grasping reality, given their inclusion of several specialists, many perceptual differences can arise that affect the identification of adequate initiatives for solving management problems. Very often, local people have a more practical vision of their problems, given their constant interactions with their ecosystem.

Finally, it is useful to make a distinction between individual and collective forms of resilience. The first refers to one's behaviour and perception in a given situation; the second, to having a more elastic and abstract content, which consists of basic value-orientations that a group acquires through time in a more or less visible way. To pay attention to these two levels of resilience presupposes various research strategies, going from short, direct observation in the field to longer-term involvement in the group's history and evolution. Attention must be paid not only to the physical aspects of ecosystems but to the people's diverse perception mechanisms. Conceived through various ecological and social scales, resilience and heterogeneity are not incompatible concepts but rather integral parts of a same phenomenon: a changing continuity. The case studies clearly show that several management initiatives in the Caribbean could benefit from greater methodological care at the intervention level. Indeed, if more attention had been paid to local variations at the outset, there would have been less need for retroactive and rectification efforts. Now these are necessary. The range of problems encountered in the numerous marine protected areas (MPAs: see chapter 4) in the region provides an instructive set of examples.

Local disparities and sub-regional governance channels

Striking elements that emerge after studying Caribbean coastal management issues are the diverse forms of communities' boundaries, the variety of their economic activities, and the diversity of political and institutional contexts in which they are embedded. However, as one moves from the community to the national or regional level, this diversity has to be reduced to a more generalised form at a methodological level and captured in more structural terms. As stated by Olsen (2001, 10), one option is to build systems of planning and decision-making that operate across a range of spatial scales and to develop governance systems as nested systems in which the goals/actions taken at one scale do not contradict those at higher and lower levels.

In other words, the establishment of management policies must rely on research approaches that balance the respective weights of local and national/regional features.

Our work begins the process of better understanding what is happening at these levels in coastal areas. We list below a number of sub-issues that are emerging from our work to date. These issues are overlapping and represent initial 'first cuts' at what is a complex situation that is evolving without much of a defined theoretical framework. Nonetheless, these issues should be useful for enriching our comparative efforts; hopefully they will lead to the examination of policy changes with some operational value.

Spatially and temporally fluid boundaries

These are examples based on cases of resources, fishers' and harvesters' movements, and tourism expansion. The preceding chapters examined great variations in the communities' spatial extension. These communities' situations are influenced not only by their population size, but also by the nature of their economic activities, the availability (migratory nature and/or seasonal variations) of their target resources, and the need to be mobile in order to harvest these resources.

In Grenada and Trinidad, for instance, the fishers' mobility entails recurrent seasonal moves in given coastal areas, with a return to inland locations during periods of inactivity. A similar situation prevails in the Jaragua Park of Dominican Republic. In Sartaneja, Belize, fishers undertake weekly migrations with extended stays in secondary locations. In spite of their differentiated capital assets and technical specialisation, over time these producers and their families have developed a sense of sociological belonging to the notion of place. They have an understanding of 'their' coastal area, which has evolved into more than merely the area in which they live. This type of spatial/temporal flux or movement, combined with a deep understanding of their environment, must not be neglected in management plans that seek to promote more sustainable livelihood options. The transformations taking place in artisanal fisheries are characterised by the pressure to search for more distant and more productive fishing sites and the expansion of pelagic fisheries and aquaculture. These issues represent good examples of the necessity to pay attention to the evolving contexts in which the fishers live and work at both local and regional levels.

The Yucatan coast of Mexico offers a different example, because incomes from fisheries has improved. A variety of non-traditional fishers seasonally migrated to the coast and took up fishing as an income (or perceived income) source. Therefore, income was greater in the fishery sector than in other occupations in inland regions. Other examples of this phenomenon are plentiful in our limited examination of this set of issues. Therefore, management approaches that seek to promote a fixed-in-one-place, full-time, one-fish-stock-focused approach would seem to run counter to the traditional situations found in most of our research cases. In them, a more heterogeneous approach based on fishers' movement/migration was a critical element of resilience in the communities studied.

On the other hand, these fluid boundaries at a local level are embedded in larger economic-political contexts that also are evolving. For instance, the importance of the fisheries at national-regional levels, relative to local levels, is often inadequately understood with reference to the management implications of such boundaries. In countries where fisheries represent a minimal portion of the gross domestic product (GDP), as is the case in oilrich Trinidad and Tobago (T&T), where fisheries make a contribution of only 0.19 per cent (see chapter 7), fishers have low economic and political power. This makes their negotiations with and recognition by the authorities more difficult. By comparison, in Belize, where fisheries represent more than 7.2 per cent of GDP, fishers have successfully developed strong social coalitions that are often referred to as models throughout the Caribbean.

So here again, local contexts have to be examined within a changing, larger spatial and political framework if one aims to better understand their specificity. For instance, despite their differences, fishing communities in Belize share a number of positive features, compared with those in T&T, in the sense that they belong to an economic sector which is of vital importance and in which they have some political weight. By contrast, in T&T fishing has a much lower priority both economically and politically. This affects fishing communities in several ways, particularly in terms of their ability to influence policies and related activities above the local level.

Finally, in the midst of these larger management issues concerning economic activities at the local level, the Caribbean communities are more and more faced with an increased expansion of tourism, ranging from beach mass tourism to scuba diving and sport fishing. At the governance level, this economic sector implies the presence of differentiated social actors, many of them possessing more political power than the local inhabitants. The expansion of tourism can promote greater conservation efforts and help local communities to develop new activities around ecotourism and related projects, thus offering a variety of new livelihood opportunities, but also generating many conflicts in relation to the access to and ownership of coastal land and marine areas, as well as associated resources. This is especially true when those who initiate the projects belong to outside institutions. The Isla de la Juventud case in Cuba is a good illustration of this, with the almost complete eviction of local fishers from a 'protected area' now reserved for international tourism. Given the economic importance of tourism in the Caribbean, it remains a key structural variable for grasping management problems that interfere with communities' specific management options.

Understanding the barriers to decentralisation

We have assumed that the lack of successful CBCRM experiences in the Caribbean, combined with a history of top-down interventions of many state bureaucracies, is the major factor in the limited decentralisation to date. Development of successful cases of community-based management will help to test this assumption. This barrier to decentralisation is also partially explained by the political-territorial fragmentation in the region. This phenomenon likely did not support the establishment of common and robust decentralisation policies in which communities could have acquired greater decisional autonomy. Colonisation was a process in which the political leaders, who often relied on authoritarian measures, were external to the region. This situation established a distance from the local populations. For a long period, productive incentives were oriented mainly towards the needs of external economies. This plantation-economy approach has prevailed until recent years. Now, greater economic diversification is increasingly recognised as a more useful policy orientation. Even in socialist Cuba, the plantation-economy orientation was at work until recently (Doyon 2003).

Continuing the search for improved understanding of the diversity, we have observed that the Caribbean Sea has diversified marine ecosystems (see Map 1 on page 191 and Table 10 in this chapter for more information on this heterogeneity). These represent a strong set of ecological drivers that operate in the more than 30 Caribbean countries. These processes have led to various management traditions and institutions whose integration is still in considerable flux. We also need to emphasise how these political and economic structures are evolving, particularly in recent decades. During this period, some regional institutions (such as ACS, CARICOM, and CRFM; see Haughton et al. 2004) are now seeking to rationalise their management efforts within a wider set of policy drivers. However, it is evident that important gaps still remain in the promotion of effective collaboration between many of the key countries. These gaps negatively influence regional collaboration and generate disparate impacts on local communities.

Improved understanding of institutional capacities

Important sub-regional differences are found in the countries' research-organisation capacities. This must be taken into account in the promotion of CBCRM approaches in the Caribbean. There is no doubt that Mexico, Cuba, and Dominican Republic—and to a lesser extent Jamaica, Barbados, Costa Rica, and T&T—possess relatively strong capacities, with known institutions in marine affairs that are actively involved in coastal zone management initiatives. But we should be aware that, in spite of their advantages, these countries have been strongly influenced by the top-down approaches of international agencies before and after the 1992 conference in Rio de Janeiro. Indeed, they have created numerous marine parks and reserves in which the consolidation of CBCRM was not a priority.

As mentioned by Begossi and Brown (2003, 136), 'participatory' consultations often took place when decisions had already been made behind closed doors, thus relegating various management concepts to the realm of 'rhetoric'. As was illustrated by the initiatives that took place in several coastal areas covered in that book, the criteria put forward by international agencies and applied by national agencies and bureaucracies often prevailed over local perceptions and uses of the resources. Chapter 4 explains well how the population of San Felipe, Yucatan, Mexico, wanted to create its own marine reserve in the mid-1990s. Nevertheless, the community had to engage in several retroactive skirmishes with the authorities to regain more autonomy and decision-making capacity. To date, considerable resources have been put into building local capacity to pursue these objectives, but the battle is not over yet. Further implications of this issue of improved understanding of institutional capacity and what is needed to promote change are taken up again under the section on lessons learnt.

Common regional and sub-regional issues and meso levels of governance

Recent approaches to CBCRM (Kearney 2004) suggest that all stakeholders must pay more attention to 'meso-levels' of management instead of putting too much emphasis on generic images of both state and communities. These meso levels presuppose that in the interactions between the state and the communities, various agencies or individuals (state agencies, NGOs, private-sector groups) seek to intervene, with different mandates, interests, and responsibilities. Legal bases for community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) derive from particular contexts, both ecological and institutional. Therefore, we believe that another barrier is a lack of understanding of the relations that communities develop with such institutions or their representatives. At the level of the communities themselves, there is a need to better understand the heterogeneity at this bureaucratic level when examining the decision-making process (horizontal and vertical) linked to a particular management problem.

In summary, the major difficulty lies in the fact that the central government has almost absolute power in most Caribbean countries. The presence of political delegations or subdivisions, whether federal, provincial, or municipal, often generates a nominal decentralisation in which local populations possess limited autonomy. The presence of a new institutional mechanism, such as a ministry representing a federation of local communities (or the like), could be an important idea to explore in selected countries in the promotion of a community-based coastal resource management (CBCRM) approach.

CBCRM and paradigmatic shifts in management issues

As is often the case in the consolidation of a new paradigm, the initial assumptions that surrounded the consolidation of CBCRM and related management concepts a few decades ago relied on what was possibly a lack of clarity between their explanatory power and their apparent novelty (Brosius, Tsing, and Lowenhaupt 1998). A new paradigm generally emerges when, in a given context, the existing devices are progressively losing their previous usefulness in the face of a changing reality. Without entering here into the differences between paradigmatic shifts in natural and social sciences, new ideas about management have been rooted in the prevalence of natural resources (natural-science approaches) over human beings (social science). The latter have been progressively taken into account with the consolidation of bio-economic science and debates about common-pool resources.

However, the 'tragedy of the commons' paradigm sets aside many social and cultural factors that should be inherent components of any management effort. Promoted by international and national agencies as well as academic institutions, management paradigms have suffered from the beginning from a lack of internal critique. The result is that they were often thought of as universal devices applicable to a variety of contexts within a top-down framework. Therefore, it is not surprising to see that the consolidation of CBCRM approaches has been strongly promoted by NGOs, in recent decades, to counterbalance the power of the state. At first, this led to a generalised model, which was thought to be applicable in several contexts within a relatively mechanical framework.

However, after a few decades of experimentation, these paradigms have led to new sub-paradigms in which there is a greater recognition of the complexity of the real world and the interconnectedness between humans and ecosystems. The numerous continuing discussions about co-management are very illustrative of this situation and draw attention to the unfinished state of the debates (Wilson et al. 2003; Pomeroy et al. 1997; Jentoft and McCay 2003). Overall, and in spite of sub-paradigmatic shifts, mainstream narratives on management continue to lead to attempts to cope with a large number of empirical cases without sufficiently taking into account their specificity, and remain influenced by state and global capital investment (Nichols 1999). The epistemology linked to coastal management is a good example of the emergence and consolidation of paradigms in a context in which political and economic factors prevailed over more scientific criteria. As well, the resilient logic of bureaucracy always tended to standardise rather than differentiate social groups within which it interacts. This is what we call the homogenising approach, which runs counter to the need to recognise and conserve the key group components, or the heterogeneity factor.

In summary, several gaps can be identified between the existing theories and practices that are linked to management initiatives in many countries. Despite recent and positive reorientation efforts, in which both co-management and community-based management are the object of analytical refinements, most of the epistemological basis supporting their central concepts is still rooted in a westernised culture that has a tendency to expand its own logic at the expense of other cultural premises.

This volume seeks to focus attention on the limited operational value of several management concepts in the Caribbean. This body of work rejects the nominal use of the notion of 'community' in its traditional sociological sense. Instead, it places emphasis on the importance of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) in the establishment of protective measures in fishing communities. In addition, it shows that local people's resilience capacity can lead to initiatives that contradict the state's formal plans, and emphasizes the importance of cognitive or local people's mapping for critical issues such as the definition of boundaries of a given management area. Rooted in the promotion of interdisciplinary frameworks coupled with a focus on the communities' heterogeneity, this volume seeks to question the often too-mechanical approach that still prevails in several management institutions. It aims to underline the importance of continuous interactions with community members at the research level as a crucial methodological approach to better understanding of the heterogeneity factors.

Lessons Learnt in the CBCRM Caribbean Programme

This section consists of a brief review of the methodological orientations that prevailed during the two phases of the above programme, which took place between January 2000 and February 2005. We examine both its positive outcomes and its shortcomings. In addition, this section provides some guidance for future programmes of a similar nature.

Looking back over the admittedly broad original project objectives that led to our initial project design, we feel that, generally speaking, our plan to undertake applied research in and around communities and their links to coastal management in the Caribbean was a good idea. However, hindsight tells us that our thinking shifted, early in the programme, towards developing research teams and building an appropriate interdisciplinary capacity for conducting research. This shift was unforeseen in the initial design, and we look at it as part of our adaptive learning process. Overall, it was probably one of the significant lessons learnt. This realisation conditions the remarks that follow, where we aim to enrich readers' views of the Caribbean context for research initiatives on management issues.

Advantages and limitations of a small-grant approach

The IDRC Caribbean programme was developed after the International Workshop on Capacity Building for Coasts and Oceans Management in the Wider Caribbean, held in Havana in July 1998. Having had the opportunity to exchange extensively with various donor agencies and researchers involved in the area, IDRC representatives decided to establish a specific component on the coastal Caribbean, within its larger MINGA programme in Latin America (minga is a Quechua word meaning communal work or cooperation). After examining a variety of project methodologies, the small-grant approach (SGA) was deemed a relevant strategy in this initial step, with awards ranging from US$20,000 to $30,000 per project. Given the general lack of CBCRM initiatives in the area, this funding limit was based on what seemed a reasonable start-up grant, when combined with our objective of reaching a reasonable number of research teams. At the same time, we wanted to allow for a comparative examination of the diversity of problem sets and specific issues, all involving interdisciplinary research in CBCRM. A pan-Caribbean framework was considered an important part of this work, one in which a better equilibrium could be reached initially between Spanish- and English-speaking countries, without neglecting the presence of other languages. Two regional institutions, International Ocean Institute (IOI) in Costa Rica and the Caribbean Fisheries Research and Management Programme CFRAMP (now CRFM) in Belize, agreed to act as the regional partners. They were responsible for the administration and monitoring of the projects, in collaboration with Laval University in Canada, on the social-science methodology. Representatives from each institution formed the scientific and administrative committees of the programme.

Altogether, 32 projects were selected and funded, starting with 17 in the first phase. In total, more than 120 proposals were received despite limited publicity efforts, especially at the beginning of the second phase. The proposals came from 12 different countries in Phase I and from more than 20 countries in Phase II. During the second phase, the most populous countries—Mexico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic—submitted the highest number of proposals. In retrospect, the SGA appeared to be a wise choice as well as a functional one, revealing that there is surprisingly widespread interest among individual researchers and regional institutions. As explained in the introduction, the objectives were relatively broad and allowed the programme a certain visibility and continuity in the area. In terms of subject matter, the SGA also allowed the identification of a highly diversified set of coastal management issues, ranging from fish stock depletion to drinking water contamination, from the establishment of marine reserves to gender and stakeholder analysis, and so on (see Table 12 for a summary).

TABLE 12
HUMAN USES OF COASTAL AREAS IN PHASE II OF THE CARIBBEAN PROJECTS

Note: Internal and external wage labour is a widespread phenomenon in several communities.

Such diversified project topics led to a variety of challenges in the establishment of a rigorous monitoring process. They also led to various operational constraints, including travel (mainly monitoring but also team exchanges) and communication problems (mainly with e-mail). More important, the research teams presented strong internal differences that did not make it easy to develop a systematic research framework. But probably the most salient shortcoming of the SGA was the high transaction costs that led to major time management problems, both at the level of the individual research teams and at the higher management levels (for instance, scientific and administrative committees).

As the programme evolved, we became very aware of a major miscalculation of time. One important lesson involved examining time far more carefully in the future. We must be more specific in our up-front calculations and criteria, so that time expectations will be more defined and spelled out at the outset. For most of the people involved in the programme, whether on the research or administration side, the work had to be done on a part-time basis. This project represented one portion of their larger responsibilities. In many cases this problem was not recognised adequately, either at the outset or later on, during the various implementation stages. As a result, some field visits had to be postponed, causing discrepancies in the follow-up of the projects, and the plans for disseminating results had to be constantly readjusted. This project has involved a major learning-by-doing process in which the outcomes have to be balanced within a series of constraints (more details are available in some of the programme reviews; see, for example, Den Heyer and Savard 2002). A reduced number of projects certainly would have facilitated the monitoring efforts but would have impinged negatively on the programme's pan-Caribbean orientation.

Many of the projects in the second phase built on the experience of Phase I. In addition to selecting projects based on a better disciplinary equilibrium in the research teams, the selection criteria strongly insisted on the notion of community as the main locus for activities. Greater attention was also paid to women as local stakeholders. In addition, early on during Phase II, all project leaders collaborated in designing the content of this final publication, including a process where each team was engaged in collective writing through what became chapter sub-groups. At the beginning, this generated cohesion that afterwards facilitated group exchanges and communication between the projects, in spite of the reliance upon a mixture of Spanish and English languages.

Note, however, that our desire to strike a regional balance probably gave rise to the selection of too many projects. In addition to linguistic criteria, the selection sought to include the insular and continental location of the projects, particularly with regard to communities located in small as well as large countries. In one case, a project was terminated because of poor performance in terms of interdisciplinarity, as well as undue delays in initial planning. In other teams, the intrinsic diversity of the Caribbean communities represented a challenge that even a well-planned SGA approach could not entirely overcome. Thus, to some extent, this created a complexity misdiagnosis. Overall progress was nevertheless made between Phases I and II on processes for the selection and monitoring of the selected projects.

Difficult implementation of interdisciplinarity

Convinced that true CBCRM projects could not be conducted without a strong emphasis on interdisciplinary efforts, the organisers clearly promoted this orientation from the beginning of the programme. It gave rise, at the end of Phase I, to a collective publication dealing mainly with that orientation (IOI-CFU-LAVAL-IDRC 2002). In this volume, chapter 2 re-examines this issue, discussing the collaboration mechanisms between researchers involved in two Yucatan communities.

In the Caribbean, as in other regions, the precedence of marine sciences in research and administrative institutions that are linked to coastal management partly explains the low number of social scientists involved in the field. The limited social-analysis skills in some research teams was also probably a function of historical research training paradigms; some of this capacity gap appears to be more specific to some countries. Nevertheless, we were surprised that there was such a limited ability to undertake this aspect of the work, and we spent a considerable amount of time trying to understand and remedy the problem. For instance, it became apparent later that in some proposals the social-science contribution was inserted nominally, and did not reflect true interdisciplinary approaches.

Overall, in the approved proposals, only about 15 per cent of the project leaders came from a social science background. Among the 15 projects of Phase I, 11 reapplied but only three were selected, the rest being eliminated mainly because they did not show sufficient progress in this regard. Through the selection process of Phase II, however, coupled with a stronger emphasis on the community as a unit of observation and the search for a better gender equilibrium among the project leaders, we were able to reach an improved balance between the disciplines and get closer to the initial objectives of the programme.

However, this improved context probably led us to assume too rapidly that all the existing staff was capable of undertaking initial, basic or elementary level interdisciplinary research. We also assumed they would engage in a variety of tasks despite conflicting responsibilities in their own organisations. For example, they had to obtain the necessary support from their supervisors and spend adequate amounts of time doing field research. This was particularly true in the initial stages of research programme design, so as to build adequate links with the communities. Finally, they needed to develop a research team and not just rely on individuals to execute the research programme.

Similar remarks can be applied to the experiences and capacities of the scientific steering committee. The process of developing the research objectives, choosing the appropriate regional partners, setting up the programme governance mechanisms, defining the process of soliciting the applications, and then choosing the grants to be funded, refining the research design, developing a monitoring and evaluation process, and preparing a dissemination phase implied coordination efforts in which the members' experience was far from being homogeneous.

In addition to complexity linked to responsibility-sharing between the actors involved in this CBCRM Caribbean programme, all were somewhat influenced by and formed part of the existing larger and widespread disequilibrium between the number of natural and social science researchers in coastal management. On both sides, various epistemological frameworks remained characterised by an institutional resilience. But it valorises specialisation at the expense of interdisciplinary collaboration. On the one hand, biologists are familiar with referring to models that successively stem from one individual's efforts, with a tendency to verify quantitatively the explanatory potential and limits. Such analysis is greatly enhanced with computers.

On the other hand, although some individuals might have a more salient contribution in the consolidation of a given paradigm, social scientists refer to 'schools of thought'. In these, dominant paradigms are the object of constant internal critique, within an overwhelming qualitative approach that seeks to explain a changing reality. This basic difference partly explains why natural scientists pretended, over a long period, to reach a higher-quality scientific level than their social sciences colleagues, given their apparently more stable operational models. But there have been numerous problems and failures in fisheries management during the last decades. The progressive promotion of precautionary and responsible approaches within national and international agencies, combined with a stronger interest among scientists in multiple species–oriented research (the former 'scientific image' of marine sciences) has produced a less formal and predictive content.

This opened new paths of collaboration with social scientists. At the same time, however, the latter were influenced by post-modernist trends that were oriented towards questioning their former normative models. These elements are visible in many of the projects of this CBCRM programme. As the programme evolved, we noticed slight but constant changes in the attitudes of the researchers towards a better recognition of the value of interdisciplinary exchanges. We never reached the level of collaboration that we so ideally sought at the beginning. Considering the aforementioned constraints, we are convinced that one of the main outcomes of this programme lies in the progressive, changing attitudes regarding the necessity for more collective research efforts among the researchers and institutions involved. In all probability, we should have sought to capture these changes in more specific ways. However, as a further example, these changes were also shown by hiring practices, such as the occasional hiring of social scientists by local research teams, or in the direct financial support or facilities provided by research centres for programme activities. Discussion with the senior management of many of these institutions clearly showed their desire to improve this orientation in the future, where institutional policies permitted.

This CBCRM research programme offers first research on marine ecosystems and communities. Therefore, although it appeals to biologists and social anthropologists, it is important not to limit the interdisciplinary approach solely to these disciplines. Any CBCRM programme that looks for good results cannot neglect the impact of new management measures on the people's livelihoods, nor on their future relations with the regional or central political authorities. In this regard, the quality of many Caribbean projects could have been enhanced through the insertion of micro-economists, political scientists, and environmental lawyers, who could have better studied these various dimensions linked to the suggested changes in the selected communities.

Overall, building the hoped-for research teams is more complicated than we originally thought. We need to spend more effort on capacity building, but capacity building alone will not be adequate. We also believe that more effort should be put into building interdisciplinary teams. Clarity of purpose, goodwill and cooperation, and information sharing and trust are some of the important factors (Marshall and Lowther 1997). We do not sufficiently understand the impediments to interdisciplinarity, and undoubtedly we must examine this aspect more critically. Also, we now know that a more detailed examination of fundamental capacity-building approaches in which most of the staff have been trained should be a part of any future pre-project analysis.

Diversity of institutional affiliations

In the proposals received in the two phases of the CBCRM programme, there was considerable diversity in the institutional affiliations of the applicants. Given our desire at the very beginning to promote a pan-Caribbean framework, we were aware that research facilities would vary to some extent from one country to the other. In this regard, the selection criteria emphasised more the diversity and the quality of the research topics than the strength of the institutions to which the proponents belonged. Early in the process, we decided against preliminary local site visits and evaluative investigations by the selection committee. Our decision may be worth revisiting, particularly if larger-size or longer-term projects are planned. We received proposals from researchers located at known research centres, university departments, state agencies, and NGOs. We were also contacted by graduate students engaged in PhD programmes in and outside the Caribbean.

With regard to the researchers' status and affiliations, however, various difficulties can be pointed out. The first one was that the majority of researchers were members of specialised sub-units. They rarely shared a meaningful background in terms of interdisciplinarity, in spite of their access to a wider mix of research facilities in their own institution or other nearby organisations. Whether they were from natural- or social-science departments, their previous practices were oriented towards collaboration with colleagues of the same discipline. We noticed that in some research teams, the inclusion of staff of different disciplines often led to an arduous working process within the project team and within the institution. This meant that support and stimulation from the regional and collaborating partners was often needed. As well, where they existed, interactions among team members were sometimes rather nominal, whereas we had hoped at the outset for a real collaborative approach. In some cases, the interdisciplinary partners terminated their collaboration in the initial phase of the research. In another project, the activities had to be cancelled after a few months because it was impossible to form an interdisciplinary team. In addition, many researchers from academia and government agencies were often obliged to negotiate and justify their additional workload with their immediate superiors. This situation created additional constraints for the planning of activities with the 'outside' researchers and added to the increased transaction costs. Needless to say, this diversity of institutional affiliations added specific constraints for the regional partners who were in charge of the administration of the projects. This was particularly true given the variations in fiscal year and in the internal administrative procedures in each institution.

Given their omnipresence in several institutions related to marine research, it was easy to find well-qualified biologists interested in CBCRM research. The same cannot be said for their social-sciences counterparts. In some countries, social sciences do not have high status and are often merged with related disciplines such as education, psychology, geography, and philosophy, in which stakeholder analysis within a community is not given priority at the methodological level. Nevertheless, we noticed that younger researchers, some of whom had recently trained in interdisciplinary work while at university, showed a greater appreciation and understanding of collaboration with colleagues from other disciplines. Perhaps we should focus our future efforts upon these researchers.

Finally, some projects stemmed from NGOs, most of which had worked for more than a decade in the region. Many of their researchers already had significant contacts with the community under study and had developed communication and relationship channels that facilitated their interactions. On the other hand, even though these research groups have been at the forefront of the debates for better recognition of the role of the community in management plans, they often gave priority to conservation objectives rather than true community participation. Their minimal familiarity with socialscience methods often led them to confuse community workshops and environmental education with a larger and more systematic investigation of the community's social structure. The Rapid Rural Appraisal approach that had become popular in several programmes a decade ago did not help in promoting this orientation; in fact, often it had the opposite result, simplifying their vision of the on-the-ground reality.

In most of the research teams composed mainly of natural scientists, they gradually became sensitised to the complexity of social organisation. In particular, they are now more aware that specific research techniques are needed for understanding a social organisation's evolution and contradictions.

In summary, the great variations in the basic characteristics (both academic and institutional) of the research groups represented an important challenge for the promoters of this CBCRM programme in the Caribbean. Selecting and/or developing interdisciplinary research teams in target institutions in the region will be a critical next step in the facilitation of future work.

Monitoring, group exchanges, and the devolution principle

From the very beginning, the promotion of a pan-Caribbean framework entailed strategies aimed at reinforcing exchanges between the projects. Faced with the necessity of dealing with projects in English and Spanish, and because bilingual communication capacities were weaker on the English side, it was necessary to adopt a division of labour, taking into account the basic features of the projects and their variable time frames. The identification of two regional partner institutions, IOI and CRFM, each with bilingual and interdisciplinary staff who were in charge of the administration and monitoring of the projects, was an important step. It should also be recognised that, particularly in Phase I, most of the researchers were (and in many ways still are) in a learning-by-doing process. Their intervention strategies varied according to the projects, thus generating continual adjustment efforts for the programme's promoters. In addition, changes in personnel in some institutions during the second phase created additional constraints to building strong interdisciplinary teams

Monitoring and evaluation

Project monitoring was built into the programme as an important methodological support mechanism. Taking into account the number of projects, their internal diversity, and the travelling time and efforts required to interact with some of them, this operation certainly led to several positive outputs for the programme's development. But as mentioned earlier, we believe we learnt some lessons that should improve similar initiatives.

Two rounds of field visits were forecast for each phase of the programme. Each regional partner had relative autonomy in setting the specific schedule. Therefore, all partners did not adopt exactly the same guidelines, even though these had been previously discussed as part of the general framework for the overall programme. In addition, the forecasts of the projects' durations evolved within a variable time frame, ranging between nine and 24 months, according to the researchers' research programme and availability. This obviously made it difficult to adopt more systematic evaluation criteria, and above all it jeopardised the establishment of a more structured, collective follow-up of the projects. Finally, for administrative purposes, each project had to submit an annual financial report in which its expenses were justified. Since many of the field visits coincided with the same period of the year, confusion arose between these financial reports and the progress reports that normally should deal more with the content of the projects. In addition, along with the direct monitoring and evaluation visits, other interaction tools must be added. These include such things as literature, technical support tools, regional training sessions via workshops and exchange visits, collaborative partner mentoring, and evaluation questionnaires. To sum up, we probably incorporated too many implicit factors into our design without sufficiently checking on their status.

Networking and regional exchanges

During Phase I, there were limited exchanges planned between the projects. A regional meeting was held in June 2001 in Mérida, Yucatan, where each team presented its results. This meeting was judged very useful because it helped to develop a shared methodology as well as shared learning. After the next group of projects was selected, Phase II began. Another regional meeting was held in June 2002 in Costa Rica, which researchers from each project team attended. Participants reported that it greatly enhanced the quality of communication between the researchers, and that it gave rise to the establishment of a reference grid in which they had the opportunity to better define their opportunities for shared learning. One other change was that in this volume, all chapters of Phase II are based on a collective, comparative ethnographical approach rather than on single case studies. During Phase II, sub-regional meetings between groups of researchers were held in Mérida, Yucatan, in June 2003 and in Port of Spain, Trinidad, in April 2004. A final regional meeting was held in the Dominican Republic in June 2004. Added to these efforts, the group from Laval University, Canada, made regular efforts to supply the projects with relevant documentation. They constantly communicated with the project staff and the regional partners to enable the creation and consolidation of this volume.

We need to emphasise another positive learning experience. This was researchers' efforts to interact with their communities in order to establish research protocols, discussion groups, and workshops for the dissemination of information. Unfortunately, resources were not available for a systematic evaluation of the various initiatives that took place among the projects. However, in many of them we know this has been a well-received strategy that built stronger, mutually trusting relationships with local stakeholders. The CINVESTAV team's experience described in chapter 2 illustrates the investment required for the promotion of a stronger participatory approach. It demonstrates the value of well-structured sessions of information sharing, both on continuing work and on outcomes of the project, with the local population. However, without a detailed knowledge of the social dynamics that prevail in a given context, this exercise might be useless or even misleading in terms of real understanding and participatory project planning (Fauroux 2002). During Phase II, more significant exchanges were implemented among all the programme's participants. But there is no doubt that with fewer projects, financial restrictions in this regard would have been less onerous. Once again, our pan-Caribbean orientation forced us to engage in some compromises.

Collective writing and result dissemination

A basic orientation of this publication, stemming from Phase II of the programme, has been the promotion of collective writing efforts, which reinforce its initial interdisciplinary and pan-Caribbean objectives. In addition to encouraging more structured face-to face exchanges between the projects, we thought greater emphasis on collective writing efforts would be an important capacity-building component of the programme. This volume represents but one part of the overall dissemination effort. Many of the projects engaged in other forms of dissemination including videos, Web sites, atlas production, scientific articles, participation in conferences, posters, and so on.

Long before the completion of the field research within the projects, the scientific committee started to work on a general draft plan of the publication, in close consultation with the project leaders. There were delays in getting project leaders involved immediately, as most were preoccupied with their research projects. As time passed, however, and especially as related to the consolidation of Part 2 of the publication, the project's leaders had to intervene more directly, since this step was concerned with the use of their own data. An interaction then began. This process first addressed the issue of who should assume leadership in the writing. This was particularly important since each chapter included two or three main writers and various colleagues. Agreement was reached rapidly, greatly facilitated by the researchers' previous acquaintance and exchanges. Thereafter, the most difficult part of the operation began, that of developing a common demonstrative framework in which, without losing sight of their particular case, writers could validate the use of a comparative approach around the central theme of the publication: the communities' heterogeneity. For many of the researchers, undertaking a joint writing effort with colleagues from a different country and of another discipline was a new experience. Factoring in the geographic and language barriers, this writing phase has probably been one of the most intensive, but at the same time most enriching, aspects for the researchers. Related challenges in the comparative chapters represented particular challenges posed by the difficulties of cross-community analysis. For instance, population sizes ranged from 300 to 12,000 people. This provided interesting systems to study, particularly when combined with important differences in management mechanisms that were also in place.

The part-time involvement of the researchers within the SGA led to delays and postponements in the submission of a first draft manuscript. The schedule previously agreed upon before the Dominican Republic regional meeting in June 2004 was not fully respected, and the same prevailed for the accepted revised date after the meeting. This sort of delay is probably understandable and forms part of a collaborative learning process involving a highly diversified group of researchers. Nevertheless, it should be the object of additional reflections in the future when similar programmes are being designed. The major problem was that increased time constraints forced the scientific committee to postpone its final judgement on the quality of the publication. This was because the committee did not have all the necessary information, which led to a reduction in its consultation efforts with the researchers during the final editing phase. It is hoped that this overall experience will bear several lessons for the programme's participants who wish to promote collective research and writing efforts in the future.

We present these issues so the reader can have a critical look at the CBCRM 2000–2005 programme in the Caribbean. In accordance with the general orientation of this publication, in which the concept of heterogeneity has an important analytical weight, this programme took place in a particular context and has its own specificity. But by extracting some variables within the iterative framework of the programme, readers can transpose several lessons to other programmes or regions in which gaps also exist between theories and practice. Reflections on management issues, whether at the administrative, research, and monitoring levels or at the writing and results-dissemination level, ought to focus on the reduction of these gaps between theory and practice, and the promotion of interdisciplinary and 'integrated' research.

Recommendations for Researchers and Decision Makers

This concluding section aims to formulate some recommendations that will be useful to people interested in coastal management issues, in which CBCRM is considered as a valuable approach. At the beginning of this volume, we argued that the first logical step to take in dealing with the Caribbean context was to take into account its great heterogeneity. Afterwards we documented this general feature by focusing on the malleability and diversity of the region's coastal communities; in the core chapters we showed how similar management problems could be approached differently, according to local contexts. A clear need for more and better interdisciplinary research emerged through this demonstration. The results of this could reduce the gaps between the official discourses, the ready-to-use models, and the understanding of people's behaviour and perceptions.

Our plea for greater local autonomy in order to solve coastal management problems is not intended to isolate communities. Instead, we hope that their social capital will be better recognised by the scientific milieu and the state agencies, which, we hope, will include the communities in a more significant and visible partnership. This general orientation should be taken as a guide for the comments that follow.

Policy and research at national and international levels:
Fragmentation and persistence challenges

In the Caribbean there are various organisations that seek to reinforce collaboration between national agencies and regional bodies involved in examining environmental issues, such as CRFM, the Association of Eastern Caribbean States (AECS), and the Caribbean Sub-commission of the United Nations Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO (IOCARIBE). Also present are various international organisations with their sub-regional offices and representatives. These include the World Bank, IADB, CIDA, CIRAD, the Economic European Community (EEC), FAO, the French Research Institute on the Sea Resources (IFREMER), IOI, the Research Institute on Development (IRD), and the US Agency for International Development (USAID). All are pursuing more or less similar goals designed to solve management problems. Their collaboration is probably influenced by the geographical, political, and linguistic fragmentation of the region; thus it incorporates several shortcomings that considerably reduce the effectiveness and efficiency of their exchanges. The result is that there is a tendency to establish individual programmes that are the object of sporadic exchanges. These do not generate the real, controlled comparison that is so essential for regional development.

Periodic conferences gather various participants together, but they are generally characterised by weak follow-up activities; attempts to create regional networks do not last long once additional funds are unavailable. Without a real and comprehensive information-sharing mechanism, several initiatives have a repetitive and localised content that does not favour a cumulative know-how process. In addition, many of these initiatives are conceived through natural-sciences frameworks that do not sufficiently take into account the sociocultural elements of the particular sub-regions.

The result is that local collaboration and participation, which are often described as key elements in any CBCRM programme, are diluted in the face of state agencies' needs for justifying their existence and plans of action. During the five-year existence of the CBCRM Caribbean programme, little success has been achieved in this regard, despite efforts to inform other institutions of IDRC involvement in the region. This negative institutional resilience should be the object of serious questioning in the near future.

Challenges in adaptive learning teams: Lack of institutional
support for researchers

Most of the research teams involved in the CBCRM Caribbean programme included three or four individuals, although some teams comprised up to twice this number. The rationale for the larger size was partly explained by the programme's interdisciplinary requirements. The complexity of the management issues studied, and the necessity to deepen a series of variables linking the dynamics of given ecosystems with particular communities, also required some collective research. The limited time that the researchers could devote to their project within their overall responsibilities also probably led to larger team sizes. But whatever the number of individuals involved in the projects, several were faced with the same problem of lack of higher-level organisational support.

Several institutions, especially universities and research centres, welcomed the arrival of research funds that could increase their visibility and their potential image on the development scene. But at the same time, many of these organisations did not really encourage the researchers to invest time in an interdisciplinary CBCRM programme. This type of research presupposes significant stays in the community, including being available to interact with the local population to build trust and related relationships, organise workshops, and produce popularised documentation. All such efforts were far more complex if the community was not located close by.

These necessary inputs, which are central to the notion of participation, are in contradiction to academic requirements surrounding the usual performance-review standards for the evaluation of researchers. This is because the latter, in general, focus strictly on high-level scientific publications. In many institutions, there is a clear lack of recognition of what some call 'non-academic' work, which represents an essential input in implementation and development of a CBCRM project. In any future promotion of similar programmes, greater efforts must be undertaken to convince the administrators to rectify such situations, if they actually want their professors and researchers to contribute to solving local and national development problems.

Better recognition of the contribution of social sciences in
management programmes

In various sections of this publication, the ongoing asymmetry characterising the relationship between natural and social sciences in management initiatives has been pointed out. The imbalance is accentuated when dealing with coastal management issues because, in most institutions, marine sciences long preceded social sciences at the research and decision-making levels. Without repeating here all the arguments previously discussed, the fact is that maintaining this asymmetry has led to negative consequences from a CBCRM perspective because the social dimensions of the community's components are generally thought of as independent variables.

This is a clear illustration of the existing gaps between theory and practice. In spite of their scientific assets, academic institutions can barely escape from the logic of capitalism in which there exists a constant need for creating new products in an expanding market characterised by a strong competition for attracting new clientele. The field of coastal management has been exemplary in this regard. Almost completely absent from university programmes a few decades ago, its consolidation progressively gave rise to an increased number of courses, books, readers, and conferences. That process was greatly enhanced by the discourses of international agencies rendering these 'academic products' more fashionable. In various institutions, new graduate programmes are emerging that are oriented not only towards coastal management but even towards such topics as 'integrated coastal management', in which 'interdisciplinarity' supposedly becomes a key word. But a close look at the content of these programmes reveals that some of them are guided exclusively by natural scientists, and also that there is still a long way to go before attaining a better representation by the social sciences. In other words, it is not easy to achieve a CBCRM perspective, in which the notions of community and ecosystem receive equal attention.

Taking into account the overall projects of this Caribbean programme, in which the situation described above is easily verifiable, we are convinced that one way to reduce this disciplinary asymmetry is to put more emphasis on training young social-science students in coastal-communities research. These efforts should take place at key institutions on both the English and Spanish sides, with adequate financial and other support incentives. Another potential initiative consists of concrete support by the CBCRM-IDRC for a bilingual or trilingual social-science network, oriented towards coastal management in the Caribbean. In both cases, a few individuals' efforts will not be sufficient; some form of institutional visibility is needed that will ensure a better equilibrium between the disciplines.

Greater insistence upon women's productive role

Gender analysis formed an integral part of the majority of development programmes in many of the projects. Several studies and specialised journals exist that emphasise women's contributions to the livelihoods and development of local communities. But the gaps between theory and practice are probably more obvious in coastal and fishing communities than in agrarian mainland communities, in which women's productive role seems to be more visible. Several factors explain this situation. The limited interest of social scientists in the study of coastal communities has led to a gap in the development of information on their economic organisation. To date, the limited studies that are available suggest that before the consolidation of capitalism in fishing, women were deeply involved in some labour processes related to the activity (Thompson 1985; Cole 1991; Nadal-Klein and Davis 1988). On the other hand, the consolidation of the bio-economic sciences in many fishery administrations in the 1950s and 1960s increased the 'masculinised' view of the activity, mainly by conferring a productive role on men, while women were often excluded from work at sea. Finally, as is often the case in ministries linked to the management of natural resources, there are generally more male than female researchers and administrators in fisheries. They implicitly define the producer as a male actor extracting value from the environment.¹

The foregoing aims at making the reader aware that in CBCRM programmes, the visibility of women's productive roles is embedded in some specific constraints and stereotypes that must be overcome if we are to obtain a better understanding of women's contribution. If we add the fact that usually the key actors on the local political scene are male, it is clear that it is not always easy to emphasise women's overall importance in coastal communities. However, in the present Caribbean programme, some projects have strongly insisted on this orientation, thus showing that additional research efforts can be undertaken to obtain a richer view of the real situation.

In Trinidad, women actively participate in capital investments in fishing and are in the process of forming a regional association. In Jamaica, they significantly engaged in a mangrove reforestation plan. In Mexico, a group of San Felipe women works directly at sea and recently formed their own fishing cooperative to sell their products. In Sarteneja, Belize, several women are involved in community groups aimed at local and regional economic diversification. These clear examples prove that additional research is needed at the local level to counteract the dominant images that prevail in coastal communities. Such images deny women's potential to innovate and to enter into domains that are still generally reserved to men.

Renewed images of indigenous communities

A good part of the literature dealing with CBCRM gives a lot of importance to some indigenous communities that present, before and after the presence of capitalism, a certain degree of social cohesion and low social stratification with a reduction in the size of the productive zone. These features represent positive elements in the use of community-based devices for management problems because they facilitate decision-making processes and conflict resolution. But a brief look at indigenous cultures in the Caribbean indicates that the frequent references to indigenous communities as relatively isolated and integrated social units does not correspond to either past or present reality.

Long before their conquest, the Maya developed a state form of political organisation. In spite of the absence of urban centres, there existed a clear division of labour and various social classes. Although the colonisation period negatively affected groups such as the Taino and the Caribs, 'they did not all become extinct within the first fifty years, as has been wrongly repeated in primary school text books', and 'unlike the case in the insular Caribbean, there is no place for the extinction ideology on the continental rimland' (Palacio, Coral, and Hidalgo 2004, 10). The Kuna and Garifuna ethnographies discussed in chapter 3 indicate that, as in any other human groups, indigenous communities have undergone significant internal changes through time. They have been able to revitalise their culture and group status, and they evolved in connection with transformations taking place in the larger society. Contrary to the prevalent image in many present-day governing institutions, indigenous groups form differentiated social units living in communities with a wide variation of contexts. Future CBCRM research in these communities should be more rooted in their diversity and development patterns.

These brief remarks are aimed at making researchers and administrators more aware of some existing 'biases' in the implementation of CBCRM programmes in the Caribbean and elsewhere, and at pinpointing the relevance of interdisciplinary research at the local level. While representing only one analytical approach in the overall research efforts in coastal management, these programmes sought to promote flexible management frameworks in which science and participation can be effectively merged to meet livelihood challenges of coastal communities.

Overall, we intend to examine various means to pursue many of these recommendations ourselves, and we will be looking for partners to work with us in attempting to move ahead on these challenges.

Note

¹ Women in fisheries is the subject of Yemaya, the biannual newsletter of the International Collective in Support of Fishworkers, Brussels.

References

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