Conservation of green turtles on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua : a governance approach

Abstract

Policy-makers often regard community as one of the main conflicting and challenging points in the coastal-marine resource management context. Community response to implemented policy often poses a challenge for management institutions when addressing the complexities of the community resource interaction and societal resilience to policy implementation on their social welfare. This is usually the main reason why communities and local-communal knowledge are often omitted or ignored as a crucial part of resource management. In the effort to preserve marine green turtles (Chelonia mydas) on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, coastal indigenous communities are often left alone with the burden to cope with the challenges of socio-economic changes imposed by the management institutions. Green turtle management policies are effectively addressing the problem of resource overharvest. However, they also effectively ignore the impact of these policies on coastal communities’. This research is an effort to highlight some of the socio-economic challenges and problematic faced by the indigenous communities in the Rio Grande Delta on the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua. While addressing the negative effect of resource management when local-Indigenous knowledge and participation is ignored, it also takes into account the need for effective management strategies which integrates the collective conservation effort and community participation, as many researchers have exposed. There is an increasing awareness and concern for the cultural motivations behind the harvesting of green turtle. Pointing out the evidently critical need to shift conservation efforts from a top-down approach based purely on scientific knowledge to a joint bottom-up effort involving the local indigenous communities and their experiences as firsthand users. In time, this effort will lead to improvement of management policies and strategies which will not only provide more reliable and effective conservation methods for the green turtle population which incorporate both biological and social factors, but also ensure the compatibility with the communities’ socio-economic and socio-cultural livelihood system as resource-dependent.

Keyword: Rio Grande Delta, green turtle, resource management, Indigenous communities, conservation, community development, fisheries development, governance