Exploring governance of Lake Tana fishery: Interactive perspective on governance

Abstract

This study focuses on exploring an overview of the status and governance problems of Lake Tana fishery sector. Using household survey, focused group discussions, key informant interviews case studies, stakeholder identification and analysis workshop; it has shown that there were no legally binding rules that govern fisher’s and other stakeholder’s behavior at user level. Though fishery proclamation and regulation were enacted at Federal and Regional level, directives to enforce proclamations at the user level are not yet prepared. Whereas stakeholder identification and analysis reveals that, Bureau of Agriculture, Bureau of Environmental Protection Land Use and Administration and Bureau of Water Resource, ranked high on stake value-power level and totaled the highest score. They had a particularly strong and legitimate claim to govern the fishery sector. Above all, the power to control and monitor the fishery resource management and governance was vested to Bureau of Agriculture. However these stakeholders were not working synergistically and discharging their responsibilities to resolve the fishery governance problems. As a result too much fishing pressure and illegal fishing activities were believed to be causing overexploitation of endemic fish stocks, threatening sustainable fish production, marketing and the livelihood of local fishermen. Therefore enacting legislations at the constitutional level could not be a panacea to protect the fish resource from depletion; rather the process of rule making should be participatory to understand the local context, rules and regulations should be integrated with the local institutions and it has to be communicated with relevant stakeholders in the action arena.