Thesis (M.Sc.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 2003

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science, School of Environment, Resources and Development

The mangrove ecosystem is a very valuable resource whose benefits to man exceeds that which is usually seen. Their economic and ecological importance however are seldom acknowledged resulting to widespread destruction of the resource. In the Philippines, government policy used to relegate the area as "forestlands suitable for fishpond development". The plight of the people living within the resource has also not been given consideration in planning mangrove conversion and their valuable knowledge about the uniqueness and makeup of the resource has not been given attention to. This paper aimed to develop a strategy for the devolution of mangrove management functions into the local government and the local community of the Municipality of Panay in the Philippines. It employed the Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) technique to collect information and propositions from the mangrove community and compared this with identified criteria to find the conflict area, which will exclude an activity from the list of potential uses of the resource. This process was done through the use of the Geographic Information System (GIS) to match up the existing government rules, mangrove attributes, and other environmental considerations with the community-identified uses and activities. The legal and institutional frameworks in mangrove management were then analyzed to determine he existing rules, benefits and constraints, and the institutions involved towards managing the local mangrove resource. Results of the study show that PRA is a useful tool to draw the local knowledge of the people about the resource by allowing the different stakeholders in the local community to contribute to, evaluate, and plan for the local mangrove resource. It also demonstrated that PRA combined with GIS is an effective method to rapidly provide summary information to plan for local mangrove management. The study further shows that analysis of the physical framework needs to be integrated with the social, legal and institutional structures in the local area to overcome the sectoral and juridical segregation prevalent in many resource management programs. This thesis proposes that an institutional arrangement be made involving the various stakeholders corresponding to the new provisions of decentralization.