Abstrack:
In 2009, Budy Resosudarmo and Frank Jotzo wrote about the challenges of fighting poverty in the Nusa Tenggara Timur through sustainable policies. Environmental pressures and degradation present significant limitations to socio-economic development, vulnerability and adaptation measures. Even when new mentalities in terms of sustainability and community based resource management guide many of these goals and efforts, at the local scale implementations result in the failure or partial completion of objectives. In this article, I discuss the institutional and socio-cultural contexts that explain policies to incentivize marine resource use and extraction among small scale fisheries in Ende, Flores, Indonesia. I also discuss the plans that are being developed by NGOs and by the provincial government to introduce alternative livelihood programs. The Ende regency has experienced irregular intensification of its fishing effort over the last twenty years resulting in the entrenchment of inequality and wealth distribution in coastal villages. It has also become, next to socio-economic and environmental uncertainty, a pressure that has paradoxically prevented the eradication of non sustainable fishing techniques like dynamite and cyanide fishing. Through ethnographic (participant observation, interviews) and ecological tools, I analyze how decentralization, isolation and corruption impede real co-participatory mechanisms from being developed at the local level. The lack of political agency, external mining pressures and the absence of economic opportunities converge in migration and further pauperization. I conclude by underscoring the importance of a political ecology approach to the study of conservation policies and climate change adaptation measures.
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