Evolution of village-based marine resource management in Vanuatu between 1993 and 2001
R. E. Johannes and F. R. Hickey (2004) UNESCO A 1993 study of coastal villages in Vanuatu, an archipelago in the tropical western Pacific, revealed that, within the previous three years, marine resource management measures, designed to reduce or eliminate overfishing or other damaging human impacts on marine resources, had rapidly increased. The main impetus for these events was the Vanuatu Department of Fisheries' promotion of a voluntary village-based trochus management programme. Trochus is a large marine snail whose shell is sold for making buttons, inlay in fine wood carvings and as an ingredient in certain paints, and is rural Vanuatu's largest commercial marine export. Initially the programme involved only a few fishing villages and the Department surveyed their community trochus stocks and advised villagers on the benefits of regular several-year closures of their trochus fishery, followed by brief openings. It was left to the villagers to decide whether or not to act on this advice. The 1993 study revealed that villages that followed this advice found it so profitable that other villages quickly followed suit. Furthermore, observing what conservation could do for their trochus stocks, many villages decided to implement their own conservation measures to protect other marine animals, including finfishes, lobsters, clams, bêche-de-mer (sea cucumbers) and crabs, as well as to ban or restrict certain harmful fishing practices such as night spearfishing and the use of nets, especially gillnets. One of the surveyed villages had also set up a marine protected area and stocked it with giant clams (Tridacna spp.). In 2001, 21 of the villages originally surveyed in 1993 were revisited in order to determine how successful these community-initiated management measures had been in the eyes of the villagers. The main criterion for assessment was based on determining how many marine resource management measures had lapsed and how many new ones had been initiated. The results revealed that village-based marine resource management measures had more than doubled between 1993 and 2001. | 
