community-based monitoring and Indonesia

[Satighe at aol.com]

Sara:

I would love to hear more about the Sea Grant community-based methods. I am
also interested in learning how Sea Grant is used to support your program.
This has been a very useful discussion thread, so I am motivated to join in
with a description of our preliminary work.

As part of the URI/CRC project in Indonesia, we have begun a
"stakeholder-operated" monitoring collaboration this spring (2002). The
model is simple: stakeholders monitor their own resources (fishermen, dive
centers, hotels, national park, env agency) per their interest or mandates.
Only real responsibility is to a) use standard protocols for similar
management questions where possible, b) get trained by one of the volunteer
training centers (starting out as university, Reefcheck and NGO, will
diverge in future), c) report info on "standard forms" and d) attend an
annual workshop where the compiled results and some analysis/interpretation
are discussed. The local univ will use a statistics course and volunteers to
process data (our project will help set up module), and all participants
will get a CD with data and 1-page summary interpretations at
community-reading level each year. Non-standard or special studies from
donors, etc., will be added to the annual CD for completenes! s if not
compatibility. The only real program costs are for a coordinator and the
annual workshop--everyone else's time is volunteered.

We have over 50 sets of stakeholders committed to collecting info this year,
and plan to write a guidebook for how to set up this for other Indonesian
(or generic) districts including the method, data processing exercises,
etc., following the program over the next year. I will be presenting this
approach/model at CZ-Asia-Pacific in May in Bangkok, and should have the
background paper completed shortly if anyone is interested.

Best regards,
Stacey T.

==========================================================
Stacey A. Tighe, Ph.D.
Sr. Technical Advisor, Proyek Pesisir
URI/CRC Coastal Resources Management Project
Jakarta, Indonesia
Email:   satighe at aol.com    or stighe at cbn.net.id
Tel: (62-21) 720-9596