Browsing by Author "Islam, Mohammad M."

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    Freedom and Poverty in the Fishery Commons
    (2010) Jentoft, Svein; Onyango, Paul O.; Islam, Mohammad M.
    Poverty was at the heart of the tragedy of the commons discourse from the very beginning. The idea was that commoners would inevitably end up deprived due to their own resource overuse. As Hardin saw it, if the initial problem was freedom of the commons, then limiting that freedom would logically reduce poverty. In this article, we argue that alleviating poverty among resource users calls for a broader concept of freedom than Hardin’s – one that is more in line with that of Amartya Sen’s “freedom as agency.” Based on case-studies of smallscale fisheries and poverty in Bangladesh and Tanzania, we claim that the root of the tragedy of the commons is the restriction of freedom rather than unlimited freedom and that it is arguable whether the people who have no other option than to continue fishing for their livelihood, even in over-exploited ecosystems, could be understood to be free.
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    Poverty in Small-Scale Fisheries: The Governance Perspective
    (2010) Jentoft, Svein; Onyango, Paul O.; Islam, Mohammad M.
    In fisheries, alleviating poverty sometimes requires strategies that are inherently in conflict. When aiming to develop a fishery as a means to reduce poverty, its common pool resource basis might be undermined, resulting in greater poverty. But poverty in fisheries is also linked to, or a part of deeper social issues and processes, for instance, the marginalization and exclusion of certain communities. Poverty also has many factors— income, health, literacy, gender, power, security, etc.—all of which make poverty alleviation a particularly “wicked problem” that would require a broad process of political, social and institutional reform. In other words, poverty alleviation is not only an issue of sustainable resource management but also one of societal governance. Drawing from research in small-scale fisheries communities in Nicaragua, Tanzania, and Bangladesh, this paper describes how fishing people cope with poverty. The paper discusses what the governance implications are for alleviating poverty at individual, household and community levels, and argue that both the definition of poverty and poverty alleviation in small-scale fisheries must be rooted in real life experiences.