River fisheries management in Bangladesh: Drawing lessons from Community Based Fisheries Management (CBFM) experiences

River fisheries in Bangladesh is characterized as “open-access” and the history of administrative and legislative measures bear “contradiction and dilemmas” in resource extraction. The 1950 Fisheries act, the proclamation of 1973 that restricted lease to the registered fisher cooperatives and the experimental New Fisheries Management Policy (NFMP) of 1986 could not contribute to devolve into any participatory institution to introduce sustainable fisheries management. Because of the persistent dilemma in government policy, continued increase in fishing pressure and other anthropogenic reasons, the River resources degraded substantially. Over the past ten years, the Department of Fisheries (DOF) in collaboration with NGOs implemented community based fisheries management (CBFM) approaches with the technical assistance from the WorldFish Center. The principal goal of the approaches was to provide access rights to the fishers through organizing poor fishers and the community to introduce sustainable fisheries management in beels, floodplains and River sections. The CBFM experiences suggest that management and institution building process in river management is complex, and require participation of all concerned stakeholders including local government institutions and administration. CBFM-2 river fisheries management developed a broad-based institutional framework that include community and local government along with the direct beneficiaries and resource users. A positive feature of such institutions is its ability to facilitate flow of information among agents, which is a key to maintain solidarity within and across groups. This paper draws lessons from the CBFM experiences in Bangladesh to manage river fisheries resources in Bangladesh.