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An Interview with Social Scientist Josh Cinner

Community Voices Needed to Sustain Healthy Coral Reefs

"Conservation has got to meet community needs."

—Josh Cinner, Social Scientist

Josh Cinner became interested in studying coral reefs and how societies manage their resources while volunteering for the Peace Corps in Montego Bay, Jamaica. Now at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, Cinner is an interdisciplinary social scientist who combines economics, geography and sociology to study the interactions of local communities with marine environments.

For his recently published study, Cinner worked in dozens of fishing villages and studied coral reefs of five countries bordering and in the Indian Ocean—Kenya, Tanzania, Madagascar, Seychelles and Mauritius—to determine the severity of the human impacts on these coral reef ecosystems. Although designing management plans for such areas is challenging, as most local communities in these developing countries depend on coral reef fisheries for survival, Cinner found that incorporating traditional methods in management strategies can benefit fish populations. The results of his study, “Linking Social and Ecological Systems to Sustain Coral Reef Fisheries,” are published in the February 10, 2009, issue of Current Biology and are being presented at this month’s American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting.

Cinner’s study examined the relationships between population density, socioeconomic development, reef complexity and the condition of coral reef fish populations in five countries bordering and in the Indian Ocean. Josh Cinner

SeaWeb: How did you get involved in combining socioeconomic research with marine ecology?

Josh Cinner: I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Jamaica from 1996 to 1998 in a coral reef park in Montego Bay in Jamaica. I got really interested how humans can collectively manage these resources and the social dynamics involved.

The park was started by a group of really well meaning and really wonderful people—the tourism operators there—and they had seen the decline in corals there. So they thought the best thing to do would be to protect them and to start a marine park. One of the rules they thought would be important was to restrict spear fishermen from that area. In their opinion, tourists didn’t want to see fish getting speared.

But they didn’t really understand the Jamaican culture, and they didn’t understand the social and the economic context of the spear fishermen. The spear fishermen there were the poorest of the poor; they were absolutely struggling to survive. The perspective that a lot of the local fishermen took was that these rich white people were trying to oppress the spear fishermen and keep them from feeding their families. This led to widespread sympathy for the spear fishermen and a lack of support for the park, even resulting in vandalism and threats of violence. It took years before the park and the local fishermen began to have dialogues and acknowledge that there were valid viewpoints on both sides. So, I started to understand that if you don’t get the culture, you can’t do anything. That got me interested in the idea of understanding social and economic contexts.

Social scientist Cinner says that sustaining coral reef fisheries requires an approach that incorporates community input. ARC Centre of Excellence

SW: What was the most surprising result from your recently published study about coral reefs, fishery closures and population density?

JC: We found that economic development, rather than population, was the main driver of overfishing on coral reefs in the Western Indian Ocean. Interestingly, the heaviest overfishing occurred in communities part way up the development ladder. Communities with either very low or high levels of development tend to have about four times the reef fish biomass of the intermediate development sites. This is because societies that are moderately developed have the technology to overfish their reefs but not the institutions to effectively manage them. Any traditional systems that may have existed have broken down, but their national governments are often too poor to effectively manage fisheries. … The majority of the coral reefs of the world are in developing countries where the ecosystem goods and services are critically linked with poverty and property rights and cultures, so excluding people [from these areas] isn’t much of an option in many of these places.

Cinner's study found that undeveloped and highly developed communities tend to have a much higher reef fish biomass than developing communities. Josh Cinner

SW: What does that mean for coral reef management?

JC: There’s danger in thinking that there is a best approach. We might see examples of success and then think that we have to apply this example everywhere. There’s no blueprint that you can put everywhere. But there are some ingredients we need to consider. For instance, conservation has got to meet community needs and reflect the local social and cultural context.

SW: What role can local communities play in the health of coral reef fisheries?

JC: One of the things that we’re seeing that is giving me some signs of hope is that in many places throughout the Western Indian Ocean, there’s a real trend toward co-management. We’re seeing a very big devolution of power of managing of coastal resources from centralized governments toward communities.

There are some instances where you see examples of blending customary management and contemporary management. Where we do see this happening, we see great success—places like Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands, where there is considerably more fish inside of these community-managed areas.

SW: Why are you interested in working with local communities?

Bureaucrats in distant lands can’t prescribe conservation techniques, particularly in the social and the economic context of developing countries. The impetus for this often has to come from the communities themselves, and if you don’t work with the local communities, they’re not going to be interested in conservation and you’re probably not going to understand what strategies might work best there.

Cinner (left) interviews a community elder in Enuk Village, Papua New Guinea, in 2002 about marine resource use in the village. Josh Cinner

SW: What have been the greatest benefits for you from conducting your research?

JC: Personally, I get the satisfaction of helping provide a voice for people that don’t often have one. In the papers that I write, I try to present an alternative perspective on things and in the interviews that I do I try to take what people tell me to heart and present that to the scientific community and the conservation community. I think I have been able to do that, and that has been extraordinarily rewarding.

Another thing that I’ve loved about the work I’ve done is that I’ve had the opportunity to train professional social scientists in each of the countries that I’ve worked in. …I’ve worked with teams in Kenya, Tanzania, Madagascar, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. It’s really great to see some of my colleagues grow as scientists and get increasing recognition in the region and internationally. To see them writing their first papers and presenting at international conferences—it’s fantastic. …It’s good to be able to give others an opportunity and a shot at success.

For more information on Cinner's research, go to his page at the ARC Centre of Excellence Web site.

Interview conducted by Alex Danoff, Communications Assistant, SeaWeb