Biodiversity conservation and community-based fisheries management in Lake Malawi, East Africa (Malawi, Mozambique)
Home to over 800 species, Lake Malawi has the highest fish species diversity of any
lake in the world. It is also an important source of food, income, and employment in
one of the poorest regions on the planet. The lake is subject to a variety of
environmental problems. The most pressing of these arise from the fact that the
failure of the agriculture and aid based economy, and demographic changes resulting
from both a high birth rate and a serious AIDS epidemic, has forced people to intensify
their utilization of natural resources. This has led to intensified cultivation, serious
deforestation, and localized over-fishing. This dissertation examines the value of
biodiversity in Lake Malawi, and presents the results of field research examining the
threat to fish diversity and fish stocks posed by the small-scale fishery. I then examine
the approaches that have been taken to conservation and fisheries management in Malawi.
Decentralization is an important concept in political restructuring in Malawi, and the
Fisheries Department began experimenting with community involvement in resource management
in the early 1990's, with some limited success. Participatory fisheries management has
received great attention from fisheries managers and international development agencies,
partly because of the failure of other approaches. Field research in fishing villages at
Lake Malawi, and in the agencies responsible for fisheries management, allows for a
detailed analysis of the potential for community based fisheries management in Lake
Malawi to address over-exploitation and species diversity loss. This research raises
questions about what kinds of ecosystems are appropriate for community based natural
resource management, and adds to a growing body of literature questioning the
application of this approach. This dissertation acts to expand the analytical framework
of political ecology to include aquatic systems.