A guide for planners and managers - IUCN

The Initial Process
PART III
Case Histories of Marine Protected Areas
Key principles adopted by the Tanga Programme during the initial implementation
of activities were: work through those institutions which currently held the mandate
for management of coastal resources (government agencies); identify and involve all
stakeholders from the outset; and start small and keep it simple. The Programme
adopted a project cycle of listening, piloting, demonstrating and mainstreaming
(Picotto and Weaving, 1994) which was better suited to the above principles than the
more traditional, planning, implementation, monitor and review model.
Following these principles, the Programme trained government staff for a
facilitating rather than their previously directive role in development of management.
These staff members and villagers undertook participatory resource and socioeconomic
surveys. The surveys also included stakeholder identification, investigation of
indigenous management and knowledge as well as preliminary issue and solution
identification. Information from these surveys was used by the District Governments
to select “pilot villages” (one per administrative district). In village meetings facilitated
by government staff, villagers of the selected pilot villages used the survey information
to identify, analyze and agree about issues and suggest solutions for the issues they
had identified. The meetings agreed on the need for a plan to implement the agreed
solutions, the area in which management actions would be implemented, the principles
of management to be applied, and the timeline of the plan. Agreed solutions became
result areas in a plan whose overall objective directly addressed the agreed issue.
Villagers then formed committees representative of interest groups within the
village to define actions, who would undertake them and when. Committees also defined
how rules would be enforced, what the penalties for non-compliance would be, what
training was necessary for identified implementers, objectively verifiable indicators
for the objective and results and a monitoring programme to assess them. The reefs
to be closed were chosen using criteria villagers and government staff identified. These
included reef condition, ease of monitoring, current patterns and accessibility to
older members of the community. Committee members presented the completed plan
to all villagers and to other villages sharing the fisheries resources and to the relevant
local and central government agencies. All these bodies confirmed their support for
the plan by signing written agreements.
The outputs of this process were plans that adopted an adaptive management
strategy. This type of management strategy attempts to address the priority issues,
monitors and evaluates the actions taken, and adapts future measures to meet the
outcome of the evaluation. The objectives and results of the plans directly addressed
the issue and its principal causes respectively. Another key aspect of the plans was
that villagers took the responsibility of being the main implementers (including the
monitoring programme) with government playing a supportive, not principal role.
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