“Management over ownership”: Modern community cooperation in Langalanga Lagoon, Solomon Islands

In many Pacific Island countries, modernity has weakened the foundation of community-based resource management. In this article we describe a cooperative process among six communities in Langalanga Lagoon in order to explore how collective efforts to improve natural resource management can evolve in situations where natural resources are degraded and contested, and where both traditional and centralised mechanisms to control use have either been weakened or are missing. For over five years, communities in Langalanga Lagoon have gone through several phases of increasing cooperation initiated and driven by community members to reach a level of association that has been formalised as a communitybased organisation. A management plan for a locally managed marine area has been developed, but has not yet been fully implemented. Although community cooperation has been predominantly an internal negotiation, activities by non-governmental organisations have facilitated its development. This case study in Langalanga Lagoon demonstrates that, in some situations, the role of a management partner is to support emerging processes that may only be part of a longer journey. Although sustainable fishing has not been achieved in Langalanga Lagoon, the re-invented community cooperation suggests that degrading trajectories can be altered through community-driven processes, even when suitable conditions for community-based resource management are absent.