Monitoring small-scale fisheries catches in Indonesia through a fishing logbook system: Challenges and strategies

In Indonesia, small-scale fisheries involve about 90% of the total number of fishers and generate significant employment for coastal communities. As defined by Indonesian law, these fisheries are exempted from catch reporting which creates a large gap in catch data for estimating stock status and fishing pressure. Indonesian small-scale fishers are scattered across thousands of islands so that monitoring catches is difficult without a systematic approach to ensure long-term benefits. This paper describes the results of work by the Indonesian Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries, in partnership with the USAID Sustainable Ecosystems Advanced (SEA) Project, to initiate the development of a fishing logbook system for small-scale fisheries. This initiative addressed challenging issues pertaining to Indonesian institutional arrangements, capabilities of small-scale fisheries and reliability of fishing logbook data. A holistic intervention using the sustainable livelihood approach was used to unpack the complexities and develop strategies of enabling factors to establish a catch monitoring system for Indonesian small-scale fisheries. This initiative shows that a tradeoff between an ideal fishing logbook system versus an applicable model that may compromise logbook data qualities is inevitable. Also, co-management is seen as a suitable for the purposes of establishing a catch reporting system for Indonesian small-scale fisheries. The initial work described herein is seen as an essential steppingstone for improving management of small-scale fisheries in Indonesia.