Challenges to stakeholder participation in coastal resource management : Allen, Northern Samar, Philippines

Graduation date: 2015Collaborative management of subsistence fisheries in the Philippines requires policies that devolve authority to the local level. This involves creating mechanisms to hold managers accountable for creating opportunities for active participation by fisher folk communities. The Philippines has created a comprehensive national framework for the co-management of coastal resources at the municipal level but has generally failed to establish checks on local authority. This has allowed municipal governments to operate with little incentive to create meaningful opportunities for participation in management.\ud The goals of this research were to identify the extent and nature of stakeholder participation in resource management, and to determine how municipal efforts at co-management could more effectively utilize stakeholder participation in management and development. Research was carried out in the form of a holistic single-case study and guided by the following objectives; 1) identify the role of stakeholder participation in the coastal resource management process, 2) identify the role of participatory spaces in resource use decisions among stakeholders, and 3) identify what factors affect stakeholder participation in coastal resource management decisions\ud \ud This study shows that the socio-political context for fisherfolk in Allen is characterized by marginalization. This manifested in two significant ways; geographic marginality from living on the publically owned coastal buffer, and an inability to access the benefits of economic development. A decentralized management strategy in the Philippines has created smaller, dispersed top-down processes in Allen that appear to push out stakeholders by moving projects unilaterally from management agency to community recipients. At the same, fisherfolk's access to projects and management processes is hindered by corruption, a lack of perceived benefit for the effort required to participate and a lack of stakeholder trust in the process