mangrove management.  As individuals, they had nothing to gain and everything to lose.  The 

mangrove forest was zoned as forestry land, and exploitation of mangroves within the national 

park was illegal.  With neither resources use rights nor guarantees of future use rights, no 

incentives to participate in such meetings were apparent.  Individual economic interests clearly 

outweighed commitment to community and participatory planning processes. 

The number of community meetings and participants are often used as indicators to measure 

effective community participation.  Frequent, well attended meetings are used to indicate 

successful community participation.  However, this indicator is often misleading.  Village based 

community meetings represent one specific community, those people living in a single 

administrative village.  When dealing with natural resources management, it is often necessary 

to redefine  community  as those stakeholders or resource user groups directly linked to a 

resource.  This typically subdivides the administrative and spatial boundaries of a village 

community into meaningful components.  Furthermore, community meetings may be deemed 

successful, but success is predicated on clear identification of relevant participants.  It does not 

matter how many people attend a community meeting.  What matters is how many of the  right  

people attend and to what degree they are willing to participate and interact.    

NRMP made many positive steps towards addressing community participation in Bunaken 

National Park planning.  However, the time, vision, or foundation to satisfactorily achieve 

effective participation was insufficient.  The level of participation achieved was a certain degree 

of public awareness and consultation, primarily for data collection and zoning.  Participation 

through community meetings resulted in consultation with those who turned up, and did not 

always correspond with those who were needed.  This level of community participation was 

insufficient for active national park management.  Achieving higher levels of participation will not 

likely come from further community meetings of this nature. 

Lesson Two: Traditional Approaches to Natural Resources Management 

A second lesson learned during NRMP efforts to develop community based management at 

Bunaken was that traditional natural resources management mechanisms, which could be 

applied to park conservation or sustainable development, were not necessarily available.  

Throughout the planning process and during virtually every community level field activity, great 

efforts were made to find traditional natural resources management tools that were sustainable 

and could be applied to the Park's management.  These management mechanisms simply did 

not exist because historically there had been no reason for them to exist.  If there were 

traditional and sustainable mechanisms of management, current GOI laws provide no incentives 

without changes in tenure and resources rights. 

Because of low population, it is presumed that resources scarcity was not historically a major 

problem. If required resources became scarce in one area, people could simply move 

elsewhere. Given the relatively short history of fishing communities living in and around 

Bunaken National Park (only four or five generations old, having migrated primarily from other 

coastal areas of Sulawesi), it is likely that their traditional resources management followed a 

pattern of migration from resources scarce areas to the more fertile waters of Bunaken.  

Resources may become scarce locally due to physical scarcity, loss of perceived user rights, 

government laws, or political and economic powers. Faced with resources scarcity, communities 

in and around Bunaken will most likely follow tradition and move to new, more fertile waters.  

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