Challenges for the development of environmentally sustainable cage culture farming in Lake Maninjau, Indonesia: an institutional perspective

The environmental condition of Lake Maninjau, a complex tropical system in Indonesia, has been suffering from the proliferation of tilapia cage culture practices. The area around the lake is inhabited by the Minangese ethnic group, which has strong customary laws and clan system. Applying the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework and based on face-to-face semi-structured interviews, this paper aims to understand the challenges for the development of environmentally sustainable cage culture farming. Our institutional analysis reveals that the main challenges are low levels of trust between communities and officials, and conflicting formal and informal institutions which have prevented the emergence of strong rules-in-use. This is a particularly interesting theoretical contribution to the literature on the management of common pool resources (CPR), as our case study is an example of private property farming in a common pool resource (the lake), a dynamic which remains understudied in the CPR literature. We provide suggestions for local stakeholders as well as regional and national government related to the importance of seeking local legitimacy of the working rules to govern cage culture. The lessons learned from this case study might be useful for the governance of aquaculture in other lakes in Indonesia and countries of the Global South.