TDA-IME Project Final Report June, 2013 3. Members of the co-management group must depend on resources from the mangroves 75 for their livelihood. 4. Local authorities must be willing to play their role in joint governance and therefore cannot delegate their role entirely to the co-management group. 5. The site must be suitable for mangrove co-management. This means that the existing purpose of the mangrove forest must be coastal protection and sustainable use of resources to meet the livelihood needs of the local population. And it must be ensured that there are no plans for development of the coastal zone for other purposes such as oil exploitation, wind farms, or industrial use. 6. A legal option must exist to formally establish a co-management group which is empowered to negotiate with local authorities/state agencies and technical departments. The key elements, or characteristics, of co-management, compared with other forms of forest governance and management (see text box below) can be summarized as: Co-management and Community Forestry: Community forestry is forest management, usually with a focus on silviculture, including timber and non-forest timber product utilization, enrichment of natural forests, afforestation of bare land and benefits from environmental services. It has a clear emphasis on management and on forest land allocation. In community forestry the government’s role is often that of a technical advisor, not a joint decision-maker. However, in recent years, issues related to governance have become more and more important in community forestry. Therefore, community forestry can also be described as a form of community governance, which is different from comanagement, as the latter involves shared management, or shared governance. (1) a participatory negotiation process; (2) a co-management agreement; and (3) a pluralistic governance institution, or integrated management board (Borrini-Feyerabend, 2011). Co-management is a local, small-scale (village level) solution to natural resource management which must be appropriate and site-specific, and must be implemented as part of an integrated- or ecosystem-based approach. In a situation where forest protection obligations are more important than rights to forest management (this is the case for mangrove protection forests in Viet Nam, for example), transfer of tenure to communities possesses little value. Also community forestry (or community governance) would not be the most effective way of maintaining and enhancing the protection function of mangrove protection forests, while at the same time providing livelihoods for local communities. In such a setting shared governance (or co-management) should be applied. Co-management is a site-specific solution, recognizing that each site is different in terms of its socio-economic conditions and natural resource use patterns, and this must be considered when applying the co-management process. Whether or not co-management is appropriate for a given site also depends on its bio-physical and socio-economic conditions and resource-use patterns. The site must be suitable for mangrove co-management (see key condition 5 above). Co-management as an approach is suitable for many protection forests in Viet Nam, as they are often located in front of the sea dykes and will remain protection forest for the foreseeable future. Whereas, in localities where mangroves cover large areas in sheltered sites, or inland from the sea dyke system, other management regimes can be applied to effectively manage the mangroves as have been documented for Malaysia by Kamaruzaman and Dahlan (2008) and Viet Nam by Minh et al. (2001). The three main phases of the co-management process explained by Borrini-Feyerabend et al. (2004) can be also be described in a four-step process, as follows (and illustrated in figure 4).
Transboundary Diagnostic Analysis of Indochina Mangrove Ecosystems
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