Policy and practice in the live reef fish for food trade: A case study from Palawan, Philippines

Marine Policy 35 (2011) 371–378

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Policy and practice in the live reef fish for food trade: A case study from Palawan, Philippines Michael Fabinyi a,b,n, Dante Dalabajan c a

ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, James Cook University, Townsville 4811, QLD Australia Resource Management in Asia-Pacific Program, The Australian National University, Canberra 0200, ACT Australia c Oxfam, Quezon City 1100, Philippines b

a r t i c l e in f o

abstract

Article history: Received 11 October 2010 Received in revised form 1 November 2010 Accepted 1 November 2010 Available online 24 November 2010

The live reef fish for food trade is a highly significant fishery that provides income for many coastal communities in the Asia-Pacific region but faces challenges relating to sustainability. This paper draws attention to the large gaps that exist between policy and practice in the live reef fish for food trade in Palawan, Philippines. While many policies have been introduced over many years, effective implementation remains a challenge. We show how the implementation of successive sets of policies has been hindered by three broadly inter-related features of the local social landscape: the capacity of government institutions and legal frameworks to implement regulations, the distinctive culture of fisheries governance in the Philippines, and the perspectives and practices of local fishers themselves. By focusing on the gaps between policy and practice, we highlight the ongoing need to examine more explicitly the ways in which local contexts shape the effectiveness of implementation, enforcement and policy more generally. & 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Live reef fish trade Philippines Palawan Policy Anthropology Fisheries

1. Introduction The high importance of reef fisheries to a large proportion of coastal residents in the tropics makes them exceptionally significant, yet they remain particularly vulnerable to problems related to overfishing [1]. The live reef fish for food trade (LRFFT, or LRFT) is one such fishery that typifies both of these characteristics in many parts of the Asia-Pacific. It has provided a much-needed source of income for impoverished coastal communities across the region, but ensuring that the trade operates sustainably has proved difficult to achieve [2,3]. While the trade continues to increase in size and value, concerns remain about the effects on the environment and coastal communities in source countries. This process has been borne out in Palawan province, Philippines, where the LRFT faces substantial challenges. Years of high levels of fishing pressure, as well as the use of sodium cyanide to catch live fish, have resulted in significant levels of coral reef degradation and the decline of fish stocks in parts of the province [3]. While the LRFT has provided an important livelihood for many fishers, fishers in some locations now increasingly have to travel further distances and for longer periods to find fish, and struggle to make ends meet as their ability to easily catch fish decreases [4].

n Corresponding author at: ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, James Cook University, Townsville 4811, QLD Australia. E-mail address: [email protected] (M. Fabinyi).

0308-597X/$ - see front matter & 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.marpol.2010.11.001

While many attempts at regulation have been introduced, implementation and enforcement of these regulations remains challenging [5–7]. This paper analyses the historical experiences of the LRFT in Palawan, focusing on how attempts at governing the trade over time have been successively hindered. The paper focuses particularly on how certain features of the social1 landscape in Palawan have together overturned or significantly reduced the impact of various regulations. While other factors are certainly at play – not least the sheer market demand for live fish in market countries – this paper emphasises the role of three inter-related local social themes: (1) the capacity of government institutions and legal frameworks to effectively implement regulations, (2) the distinctive culture of fisheries governance in the Philippines, and (3) the perspectives and practices of local fishers themselves. By focusing on such features, the paper aims to draw greater attention to how in a developing country context such as the Philippines, policies are not necessarily the central driver behind actual practices on the ground. The reality of this social context means that formal policy and management interventions are just one of a broader suite of factors that determine practices. Managers involved in trying to regulate the trade are frequently well aware of many of these issues; similarly, analysts of the LRFT in

1 The use of the word ‘social’ in this paper is a simplified term that encompasses economic, political and cultural factors as well.

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Palawan have alluded to the complicated nature of policymaking and to the ‘interplay of political and business dynamics’ [8]. However, given the continuing gaps between policy and practice in many source LRFT countries, more explicit and detailed examination of the factors that lie behind these gaps is necessary. As Mosse points out with reference to international development projects, ‘[d]espite the enormous energy devoted to generating the right policy models, however, there is surprisingly little attention paid to the relationship between these models and the practices and events that they are expected to generate or legitimize in particular contexts’ ([9] p. 640). While comprehensive, holistic perspectives are certainly needed to manage complex international fish trades such as the LRFT more broadly overall [cf 1,10]; the history of the ways in which local factors have shaped and overturned specific management interventions in Palawan suggests that greater attention could still be paid to the specific local factors that, in the end, tend to actually determine local resource use patterns. While the paper focuses on Palawan, the issues of implementation and enforcement are common to many developing countries (including most source LRFT countries), and so the arguments presented have relevance for other locations as well. After a brief background to Palawan and a description of methods, some of the regulations and management strategies that have been promoted for the LRFT generally are reviewed. The LRFT in Palawan and the specific management and regulatory interventions that have been introduced there over many years are then discussed. The analytical section of the paper then details the key drivers that have worked against regulation. The paper concludes discussing some of the broader implications of our analysis for

policy, suggesting that while management of the LRFT needs to continue to be urgently pursued, this should be done in a way that recognises the limitations of management interventions to actual practices on the ground.

2. Background and methods Palawan is a site of considerable marine (and terrestrial) biological significance and value [11] (see Fig. 1). Prominent national parks such as the Tubbataha Reefs National Park, the ongoing interest shown in the province by multiple international and national environmental NGOs, and the declaration of the province as a United Nations Biosphere Reserve are evidence of the strong association of the province with biological significance and protection. Long labelled as the ‘last frontier’ of the Philippines, modern Palawan is today characterised by ongoing struggles and contestation over how to best use the natural resources of the province [12]. The material for this paper is informed by long-term research on and experience with the LRFT in Palawan by both authors. More broadly, the methodological approach to the paper is framed by an anthropological perspective on policy, which, among other concerns, is characterized by taking the policy process itself as an object of analysis [9,13]. M. Fabinyi (first author) has conducted ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in Coron municipality, of the Calamianes Islands of northern Palawan, since 2005. He was based in a coastal community there for twelve months between 2005 and 2007; more recent research in 2009 included semi-structured interviews with 115 live fish collectors from five coastal communities around Coron.

Fig. 1. Map of Palawan province, Philippines.

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Interviews were also conducted with fish traders, and government and non-government organizations involved with the LRFT in Coron town and in Puerto Princesa, the provincial capital. D. Dalabajan (second author) has worked closely on the LRFT in Palawan since 1998 as a policy specialist, and has co-authored several reports relating to fisheries law enforcement in the region.

3. Regulating the LRFT Based on the demand for fresh, live seafood in Hong Kong and other parts of Asia, the LRFT has spread to many parts of the Asia-Pacific region since the beginning of its expansion in the late 1960s [14]. As Scales et al. [14] have detailed, in many cases the LRFT has appeared to follow a ‘boom and bust’ pattern, whereby the trade moves on to new source locations as other regions become depleted. While the association of the LRFT with destructive fishing practices such as sodium cyanide has garnered much academic and media attention, there is also general recognition of the primary and more basic problem of overfishing [2]. Largely because of these environmental concerns raised by the LRFT, there have long been and continue to be considerable efforts by a range of organizations directed towards increasing the sustainability of the trade. In source countries such as the Philippines and Indonesia, many such actions have been aimed at preventing cyanide fishing (e.g. [15]). In addition to the legislation banning the use of cyanide present in many source countries, agencies have tried to increase the level of local enforcement against cyanide fishing through a range of measures, including: the banning of hookah compressors [16], developing partnerships and strategies with the tourism sector [17], the development of cyanide detection test (CDT) laboratories, conducting media awareness campaigns [18], and the improvement of legal and institutional frameworks to deal with the problem [5,18]. Other writers informed by a more political–economic perspective have argued for greater attention to the broader social structures that facilitate and encourage participation in cyanide fishing [19,20]. Some writers have called for much stronger efforts at attitudes towards enforcement against illegal fishing [17,21], and the strong concerns many have arising from the social and ecological impacts of the trade have also led for suggestions to ban the trade outright (e.g. [10]). Other broader efforts at regulating the trade and reducing levels of overfishing in source countries have focused on the development of full-cycle aquaculture for relevant species [22], the development of alternative livelihoods for fishermen dependent on the LRFT [23], and the introduction of quota systems for particular species, such as in Australia [24]. There has also been recognition that, given the complex, multicountry nature of the trade, efforts towards sustainability must be comprehensive, involving market countries and regulations at multiple scales [1,10]. Examples of such work include proposals for an international standard for the trade and certification schemes [25,26], the listing of particularly valuable and threatened species such as humphead or Napoleon wrasse (Cheilinus undulatus) on the CITES Appendix II [27], the development of consumer awareness campaigns in Hong Kong and China [28], and the work of regional organizations such as the Secretariat of the Pacific Community [14]. Efforts at regulating the trade have thus encompassed many strategies in various locations and at a range of scales.

4. The LRFT in Palawan—a historical perspective on regulation 4.1. Development of the LRFT in Palawan Many of the issues facing the LRFT have been exemplified by experiences in the Philippines, and more specifically Palawan

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province, where the LRFT has increased in value and expanded since the beginning in the 1980s. For many years, the Calamianes Islands of northern Palawan have been the epicentre of the LRFT in Palawan. While reports do exist of a LRFT operation in Culion municipality during the early 1980s ([29] p. 39), LRFT operations did not really gather momentum until the late 1980s when a trader from the municipality of Coron formed links with a Hong Kong-based businessman to begin LRFT operations. Catch has been and remains primarily focused on the coral trout or the leopard coral grouper Plectropomus leopardus. At the beginning of their operations in 1988, the price of a ‘good-sized’ (500 g–1 kg) live coral trout for fishermen was just P80 (approximately US $1.60) per kg, but this soon increased and by the mid-1990s fishermen could obtain more than P1000 (US$20) per kg. The high price for fishermen was a strong incentive to engage in the trade, and by the late 1990s ‘an estimated 60–70% of local fishing communities (in the Calamianes) were engaged in live reef fish collection’ ([3] p. 8). As the value of the trade increased throughout the 1990s, the LRFT expanded rapidly, as local businesses in Coron formed links with Manila-based exporters, and other exporters developed buying stations in Coron. The trade quickly spread through the rest of Palawan, and by 2003 it was estimated that 55% of all the live fish exported from the Philippines originated from Palawan ([3] p. 7). Currently, the LRFT in Palawan is practiced virtually in every coastal part of the province.

4.2. Cyanide fishing A key concern in Palawan has been the use of sodium cyanide. Because of the impact cyanide fishing has across other fishing sectors – not just the LRFT – the issue of cyanide fishing in Palawan has aroused a great deal of concern amongst a range of different stakeholders in Palawan. While the precise extent of cyanide fishing is hard to verify given the highly illegal and secretive nature of the practice, one report estimated that there had been over 250,000 individual cyanide fishing trips between 1999 and 2002 in the Calamianes Islands alone ([5] p. 6). In 1993, the International Marinelife Alliance (IMA) began its cyanide detection and monitoring program in the Philippines. Under an agreement with the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR), it operated six cyanide detection testing (CDT) laboratories across the country, one of which was set up in Puerto Princesa. During its incipient years a significant volume of samples taken from the Calamianes Group of Islands was tested in the Manila CDT. In the Manila CDT there was an average of 35.2% of specimens of food and aquarium fishes which tested positive for cyanide from 1994 to 2001 with the lowest being 28.8% (1996) and the highest being 59.3% (1994) [30]. In Puerto Princesa City where most samples from Palawan were tested, samples tested for cyanide had an average of 22.5% from 1993 to 2001, with the highest being in 1996 at 43.5 and the lowest being at 10.8 in 1999 [30]. As startling as the figures are, the actual figure could certainly be higher, since a significant proportion of shipments typically fall into the cracks of the testing system. Going by these results, it is reasonable to argue that the regulations were not being effective in curbing the use of cyanide. From 2002 to 2005, the samples tested positive for cyanide declined remarkably, with 4.7% in 2002, 8.7% in 2004, and 3.9% in 2005 and a brief spike at 25% in 2003 (DA-BFAR CDT Lab-Puerto Princesa, 2006). What could have accounted for this remarkable decline? With the closure of IMA in 2003, CDT has since relied on the voluntary submission of test samples as opposed to random selection of fish samples in transhipment points. With no marked changes in the law enforcement structures, the decline in positive

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results should instead be attributed to the changes in protocols in collecting fish samples.

4.3. Attempts at regulation In the early 1990s, decision-makers in Palawan started to look more seriously at LRFT regulation after the much publicised expose´ of the IMA about the effects of an unregulated LRFT. The provincial government and the City of Puerto Princesa instituted in 1993 and 1992, respectively, a ban on the LRFT, which evoked strong reactions from the industry players. The ban prompted LRF traders and airline shippers to file a case in the Supreme Court seeking nullity of the ordinance, arguing that the prohibition would deprive them of due process, livelihood, and would unduly restrict them of their practice of trade. In 1993, the provincial government lifted the ban except for certain species like the Napoleon wrasse, humpback, or panther grouper (Cromileptes altivelis) and some species of aquarium fishes. The City Government retained the ban until this day. Ironically, in a 1997 landmark ruling, the Supreme Court sided with the provincial and city governments, saying that the prohibition was a lawful exercise of power to ensure, among many other goals, a balanced ecology [31]. By 1998, it was ‘business as usual’, except for a certification system for traders that was put into force. At this time, there was yet to be a definitive research on the declining trend of LRFT. Around this time, the number of specimens tested for cyanide using data from the CDT labs were hovering around 37–43% [30]. Notwithstanding this, there were no court records that showed cases filed for violation of the provincial ordinances. In 2000, the Palawan Council for Sustainable Development (PCSD) passed Administration Order No. 2000–05, which put into effect a revised and more detailed accreditation system for culturing, catching, trading and transporting live fish species. In 2002 PCSD Resolution 97 (2002) was passed in order to prohibit the possession or use of a compressor, and a moratorium on the award of live fish permits was also issued. By the early 2000s, several reports were appearing that emphasised some of the negative effects of the LRFT in Palawan. A comprehensive report on the sustainability of the trade in the Calamianes Islands by WWF, for example, argued that ‘the biological and ecological indicators suggest that the industry is ‘‘mining’’ and degrading its resource base, greatly compromising its current and future regenerative capacity’ ([3] p. 8). Another study documented a decrease in the mean size of P. leopardus in the Calamianes ([32], cited in [3] p. 42), while other reports pointed to the ongoing problem of cyanide fishing [33,34]. A more recent concern involves the remarkable increase in the operation of fish cages for groupers. Fishers supply fish cage owners with wildcaught juveniles, which are then placed in cages until the fish reaches a marketable size. In the absence of full-cycle aquaculture, however, fish cages will not arrest, but in fact, could hasten the collapse of grouper stocks. In addition to ecological concerns, many of these reports raised issues to do with the long-term social and economic effects of the trade. While these reports acknowledged the short-term gains in income from the LRFT, they emphasised the loss of long-term livelihood security because of overfishing and the destruction of coral reefs due to cyanide fishing, the inequitable distribution of benefits, and the cycles of indebtedness between fishers and financiers. In 2005 the USAID-funded FISH Project produced a policy brief on the LRFT in Palawan, which consolidated the recent findings on the negative trends of the LRFT in Palawan [35]. In response to the policy prescriptions of this report, the provincial legislative council passed Provincial Ordinance (PO)

941 in 2006, which was primarily characterised by the introduction of two new preconditions before LRFT could be allowed in a municipality. These were: (i) the establishment of fish sanctuaries to allow recruitment of LRFT target species; and (ii) the adoption by LGUs of a closed season, during which no LRFT activity of any kind would be allowed during the periods of May–July and November– December of every year. By the end of 2006, all but three municipalities (Dumaran, San Vicente and Taytay) had failed to comply with the conditions on fish sanctuaries. Until 2009, only Taytay and Linapacan have regularly complied with the condition on closed season. In early December 2006, the BFAR finally declared a provincial moratorium on the LRFT to force the LGUs to comply with PO 941. The timing of the moratorium could not have hurt the traders more, considering that this was the time of the year when foreign buyers were stocking up in time for the Chinese New Year. The traders in the municipalities were up in arms, and municipal leaders and fishers descended to the provincial capital pleading the case for LRFT collectors, who, they argued, would bear the biggest toll of the moratorium [6,7]. The moratorium was lifted shortly afterwards without the implementation of PO 941. The PCSD continued to be concerned about overfishing, which led to the issuance of Resolution No. 07-340 in the December of 2007. The resolution sought to establish a quota system for live reef fish with a maximum allowable volume of 140 metric ton per year on the provincial scale. Since the original passage of the resolution, a great deal of negotiation has occurred with the industry, primarily over how to determine the allocation of quota among the traders. By mid-2010, the quota system had not yet been fully implemented. The challenges facing fishers in Coron municipality are illustrative. For so long the primary hub of the LRFT in Palawan, the trade there has recently been facing large problems. While many local fishers are continuing to stay engaged in the trade, they are fishing further distances for longer periods of time ([3] p. 41, and [4]). If they have the equipment and financial resources to do so, Coron-based fishermen will travel to Linapacan municipality and even further in order to obtain good catches, as Coron waters are recognised as being generally overfished [4]. These experiences of fishermen are reflected in the declining amount of fish being exported from Coron. While at least ten traders are still active in Coron as of July 2010, the overall amount of live grouper being exported from the area has been declining rapidly since 2005 (BFAR, Municipality of Coron, 2010).

5. Discussion This section identifies some of the key drivers that have worked against regulation of the LRFT, focusing on three broadly related themes: the capacity of government institutions and legal frameworks for the implementation of regulations, the distinctive culture of fisheries governance in the Philippines, and the practices and perspectives of local fishers. 5.1. Government capacity and legal weaknesses As the work of Dalabajan has indicated [5,6], the capacity to enforce any legislation that does come about is an ongoing challenge in Palawan. Weaknesses in the judicial system and the current regime of testing for sodium cyanide mean that fishery violations for the use of sodium cyanide, for example, are usually not prosecuted. In one striking statistic presented by Dalabajan, despite an estimated 250,000 individual cyanide fishing trips between 1999 and 2002 in the Calamianes, there was not one single successful conviction for cyanide fishing between 2001 and

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2005 [5]. Dalabajan points to a range of weaknesses in the legal and judicial frameworks of the Calamianes that inhibit successful enforcement. Enforcement personnel do not have easy access to the resources that are necessary for comprehensive patrols, such as high numbers of personnel or patrol boats. Until 2005, there was no permanent judge that presided over concerning cyanide fishing or other offences related to LRFT (e.g. catching banned species, use of hookah compressor, lack of permits, etc.). At that time, the judge assigned in Calamianes also handled other Municipal Trial Courts in the province. Having to bring cases to Puerto Princesa, law enforcers needed to release the offenders since they could only hold them in custody for a very limited period of time. This greatly reduced the chances of successful prosecution. There is no CDT laboratory in the Calamianes, which means that samples must be sent to Puerto Princesa. The samples are picked by the traders themselves and by the time they reach Puerto Princesa any cyanide that may have been in the sample may have already worked its way out of the fish. Problems of monitoring and accreditation are also clear. Firstly, there is the issue of what are locally termed as ‘backdoors’, or regions where monitoring and regulation is mostly absent. The trade in the eastern island municipality of Cagayancillo, and in the remote, extreme southern municipalities of Palawan, is virtually completely unmonitored and unregulated. While there is no solid data on how much fish is being exported, discussions with traders based there and a report from Kudat in Malaysia in 2002 [36] indicate that the trade from southern Palawan to Kudat is thriving, and is comparable in size with the other significant trade centres in northern Palawan. It is unlikely that any attempt to monitor or regulate this trade will be successful until broader issues of governance and cross-border trade are addressed. Fish caging also highlights problems to do with accreditation and monitoring. In an exhaustive inventory of fish cages in one barangay2 of the municipality of Taytay, WWF presented what could be the standard fishing practice in the province [37]. In this barangay, WWF noted that there were 174 fish-cagers of which only 2 had PCSD accreditation and only 65 had municipal permits. The absence of PCSD accreditation means that the catch does not go through the standard recording system. More generally, the legal framework for LRFT is characterised by confusion and a lack of harmony between laws and different levels of jurisdiction. As Dalabajan puts it: ‘the law is so confusing that some believe it was not intended to be enforced in the first place’ ([5] p. 4).The national Fisheries Code of 1998, for example, provides that ‘exportation of live fish shall be prohibited except those which are hatched or propagated in accredited hatcheries and ponds’ [38]. This legal provision is as straight forward as it could possibly be—live reef organisms are prohibited from being taken out of the country. The industry has effectively argued, however, that the prohibition does not apply because of a lack of an administrative order from the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources ([5] p. 4–5). A legal issue of whether any province-wide system of regulation will ever be completely implemented is with regard to the issue of which level of government has control over regulations relating to waters and marine resources. Under the Philippine Local Government Code of 1991, it is the municipal governments that are supposed to have authority over municipal waters, which are waters extending 15 km from the shore—where usually the live fish are caught in. Palawan, however, is a special case: because of its unique environmental heritage the PCSD was created in 1992 with the power to implement province-wide laws on everything to do

2 Barangay is the smallest political unit of the Philippines, sometimes translated as ‘village’ or ‘community’.

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with the environment and natural resources. In practice, however, the PCSD and the provincial council tend to work with the individual municipalities, and so any attempt to implement a uniform, province-wide system of regulation is likely to be a long and slow process of negotiation to get individual municipalities to institute the legislation. As Dalabajan has argued [6], in 2006 the municipalities were able to band together and force the provincial government to ‘blink first’ and back down over its threat of a moratorium. More recently with regard to the quota system, while the legislation was passed at the provincial level in December 2007, by mid-2009 no municipality had instituted a corresponding municipal ordinance. While decentralisation is usually regarded as a form of governance that lends itself to equitable and efficient patterns of resource management, in this instance, the power of the municipalities has proved to be a notable obstacle in instituting any province-wide system of regulation.

5.2. The culture of fisheries governance in the Philippines The problem is not only about a simple incapacity to enforce regulations because of a lack of resources or weaknesses in the legal frameworks, there is also the issue of what is typically labelled ‘political will’ or a lack of it. It is not the intention of this paper to suggest that local governments are unwilling or incapable of regulating the fishery—indeed, the case of Puerto Princesa City, where the government has instituted a blanket ban on LRFT activities since 1992, illustrates that regulation is seen as a need by some policymakers and governments. However, there is an extremely high level of concern among many stakeholders – particularly among fishers — about the standards of fisheries governance in Palawan [7]. This is not always a simple issue, however. What is often simply labelled as a lack of ‘political will’, or even more simply as ‘corruption’, can be more helpfully broken down into three categories or patterns of governance. First is the way that local politicians in the Philippines are pressured to engage with the local ‘moral economy’ of fishers. Fisheries regulations are typically resisted and reshaped by fishers who appeal to concerns about livelihood and poverty (see [39] for details). Fishers who are caught violating fisheries laws, for example, will typically apply pressure to a local politician in various ways: using personalised kin networks with more powerful relatives or godparents, for example, or even resorting to more blatant tactics such as bringing one’s entire family into the office of the relevant politician and appealing for ‘pity’. This is closely related to the way in which the particular notion of ‘pity’ is represented in the Philippines: as many social scientists have noted, the idea of a ‘right to survive’ [40] or that of a ‘basic rights discourse’ [41] is a very strongly held value among local people in the Philippines, and local politicians need to be seen as respecting these rights. Frequently, these rights are seen as more important than any more abstract or legalistic laws that may have derived from the state [39]. Secondly, there is the existence of a more blatant conflict of interest among members of the political classes with regard to live fish trading. In many municipalities, for example, prominent live fish traders are liberally represented inside the municipal councils. As one concerned observer put it, commenting on the potential for successfully regulating the trade in one municipality: ‘At the end of the day nothing will happen because the people involved in the fishery are the people at the top’. This is certainly a cynical view, but one does not have to subscribe to such a pessimistic opinion to see that conflicts of interest are clearly present. Thirdly is the issue of more direct corruption; while no specific incidents of corruption are being alleged in this paper, many enforcement agencies are routinely accused by small-scale fishers

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in particular of specific incidents of extortion of legal fishers, and of accepting bribes from organised networks of illegal fishers [7]. Overall then, this whole culture of fisheries governance means that any attempt at regulation will face strong institutional opposition.

5.3. Practices and perceptions of local fishers Another set of factors working against regulation in Palawan are the dynamic and flexible nature of local fishing practices and the perspectives of fishers about governance and regulation.3 In Coron municipality, for example, grouper stocks appear to have been steadily declining for many years now [3,4]. Despite this, fishers are continuing to invest in the LRFT through various means of intensification—the use of new technologies such as fishfinders and fish-cages for grouper grow-out and fishing further distances and for longer periods of time are all ways in which fishers continue to see their future in the LRFT and will creatively find ways to stay engaged in this fishery [4]. In particular, migration to different fishing grounds around Palawan – either to gain access to better fishing grounds or better market prices – is a key way in which fishers are continuing to obtain benefits out of the LRFT [4]. This practice can be contextualised within a broader tradition among many coastal residents of Palawan of migration to the coastal zones [42]. Many of the live fish collectors in Palawan are migrants, or descended from migrants who originally moved to Palawan in order to gain access to the good fishing grounds [39]. In the modern context of the LRFT in Palawan, where marine boundaries are highly porous and fishers highly mobile, fishers will often collect the live fish in one municipality and then sell in another, migrate seasonally to different municipalities, or, as in the case of southern Palawan, sell the fish to traders who then transport it, undocumented, over the border to Malaysia [36]. These examples of movement and migration point to the dynamism of fishing practices, and the difficulty of regulating highly mobile and flexible livelihoods. Linked to the flexibility of LRFT fishing practices is the fresh (i.e. dead) grouper fishery, which has ramifications for any regulatory system for the trade in live grouper. Fresh coral trout commands a price for fishers in many locations of Palawan of around P600 (US$12) per kg—significantly higher than just about any other fresh fish. While there is only limited data on the extent of the fresh grouper fishery in Palawan, some evidence suggests that it is at least or if not more significant in terms of sales than live coral trout (BFAR, Municipality of Quezon 2007–2008). Because of the high price of fresh grouper, the challenge then is that any successful system of regulation for the live coral trout trade has the potential to push more fishers into the fresh coral trout trade. Related to these practices of fishers are their perspectives about regulation that tend to discourage regulation of the LRFT. While fishers are typically aware of many of the problems of the LRFT, they are generally opposed to many of the regulatory measures introduced. In 2009, for example, many described in detail their experiences during the period in 2008 when the closed season in Coron was briefly enforced: eating two meals a day; eating rice soup without a viand; struggling to make ends meet on a daily basis ([4] p. 420). The view of many fishers was that authorities should be focusing a lot more attention on preventing illegal fishing with cyanide, as opposed to restricting the activities of small-scale fishers who use hook-and-line [7]. The level of cynicism many 3 Clearly, in addition to the local factors emphasised in this paper, the forces driving the consumption of live fish in market countries and the increasing prices are of great significance; for fishers in Coron shortly before the Chinese New Year in 2009, for example, prices reached P3100 per kg (US$62). Any long-term solution to addressing the sustainability of the LRFT will have to address these issues.

fishers feel towards political processes means that broad regulations are often viewed as unfair and illegitimate. Another important factor behind these perspectives tends to be the lack of participation of fishers in the decision-making process. During the implementation of the quota system, for example, very few fishers even knew of its existence. Out of a total of 115 fishers interviewed in 2009 (49 in March and 66 in June) in Coron municipality, only 6 individuals knew of the quota system (5.2%). So even if fishers’ organizations may have been nominally represented in the decision-making process, in real terms the participation by fishers has been extremely limited. The lack of power among fishers in the decision-making process of the LRFT is an issue that has been recognised for a long time in Palawan (see [3] p. 87,[7], p. 262). Importantly, the lack of participation by fishers in this process is not simply a matter of social justice. It is likely to increase the level of popular opposition to any form of regulations that are introduced. The mobilization of fishers, and a popular discontent with the perceived sudden way in which aspects of Provincial Ordinance 941 were introduced in 2006, was a primary factor why these regulations were never completely implemented [7]. To simply condemn the industry and say that all of the industry players are ignoring the negative trends of the LRFT would be overly simplistic. In many provincial summits such as those organized by the PCSD and NGOs, one can see the passion among the fishers and traders to work towards a sustainable industry. What is clear, however, is that some of the particular regulatory options being pursued have long faced, and will likely continue to face, powerful social factors that inhibit or derail regulation.

6. Conclusion This paper has presented an analysis of the ways in which various policies designed to reform the LRFT have historically played out against the backdrop of the particular social characteristics of Palawan province. In doing so, the goal has been to highlight some of the considerable disjunctures between policies and actual practices, and to show how any set of policies must take stock of, and will inevitably be shaped to some extent by, these particular features of the local context. The paper has not focused on the failures of policy in order to be overly negative and critical; rather, the point has been to demonstrate the value of an understanding of local social context when designing efforts aimed at improving the sustainability of the LRFT. While the argument has focused in particular on Palawan, given the problems of implementation and enforcement of policies are widespread across many developing countries, an appreciation of such local contexts is of importance for a range of countries in which the LRFT takes place. Efforts at regulating the LRFT throughout the Asia-Pacific region have taken many forms, and many of these measures have been introduced in the Palawan province. While notable gains have been achieved in various parts of Palawan – including potentially promising developments with the proposed quota system, and particularly in relation to other locations – there remain significant problems related to enforcement and implementation of these laws and policies. These problems are in large part due to particular features of the social landscape in Palawan itself that have been emphasised in this paper, including a lack of government and legal capacity, the culture of fisheries governance in the Philippines, and the practices, perceptions, and priorities of local fishermen themselves. In this way, the paper has illustrated how policy interventions related to the LRFT are just one of a number of factors that actually determine LRFT practices ‘on the ground’ in Palawan. The paper has

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aimed to unpack some of the ‘political and business dynamics’ alluded to by Pomeroy et al. ([8] p. 64), and to show why a greater recognition and understanding of such contexts is necessary to achieve the aims of sustainable regulation. Many of those organizations and individuals involved in the work of regulating fisheries such as the LRFT in places like the Philippines are of course aware of many of these issues in practical terms—the point is that these issues could be more explicitly analysed and more usefully applied to goals of sustainability. In Palawan at least, one important potential implication for policy is the need to also strengthen particular institutions and organizations that can contribute to greater levels of policy enforcement. Given the historical weaknesses of regulatory actions, more efforts could be directed towards strengthening various governance institutions inside and outside of government. In Palawan, such actions could include greater levels of support for citizens’ groups such as the bantay dagat (sea wardens), improving the technical capacities of formal law enforcement institutions, and addressing the weaknesses of judicial and legal institutions ([5] p. 10–11). Such an argument resonates to some extent with the work of those who have sought to explain fisheries and coastal governance with reference to the concepts of ‘governability’ and ‘interactive governance’ [43,44]. While this body of work encompasses a diverse range of goals, perspectives and ideas, one of the more useful aspects of their approach is the emphasis they place on a broader conception of governance. Kooiman et al. [44], for example, define governance as ‘the whole of public as well as private interaction taken to solve societal problems and create societal opportunities’ (p. 17). This perspective of governance is useful in that it shifts attention from conceiving of governance as purely a responsibility (or failure) of government, towards the notion that governance is a society-wide process involving multiple stakeholders. In Palawan, the paper has shown that governance of the LRFT has had to take stock of broader features of society that lie outside the realm of ‘government’. This paper has highlighted how governance is not just about making better policy, but about how to deal with complicated local social contexts in order to implement these policies. This analysis has argued that any path to more sustainable forms of governance of the LRFT may need to more explicitly acknowledge the gaps between policies and practices that frequently exist. While managers and regulators are typically very aware of many of these issues, there remains a need to understand in more detail the factors and reasons behind such gaps, the actual social practices and perspectives that drive patterns of resource use, and to evaluate any potential implications for policy. Importantly, the particular factors that shape the efficacy of new policies and laws will vary in different locations, pointing to the ongoing need for deeper understanding of and engagement with the local social contexts in which regulation is always embedded.

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