The World Bank/WBI’s CBNRM Initiative

Case Received: February 17, 1998

Author: Timothy F. Allred

Email: timothy.allred@yale.edu

This case highlights the institutional transformation during 1994 of Project CESPA, an international development project in Northern Colombia that operated from 1989-1994. Project CESPA in Santa Marta was one of many implementations of the CESPA strategy, ("Centro de Especializacion para la Pesca Artesanal"), of the Ministry of Agriculture of Colombia. This strategy sought to support small-scale fishermen around the country by promoting sustainable fisheries management through technical training, capacity-building, and improved access to markets, capital, and other resources.

Project CESPA in Santa Marta was initiated in 1989 by a partnership of CISP, an Italian NGO dedicated to international development in the small-scale fishing sector, and a national Colombian organization of small-scale fishermen. Though the project’s operations were headquartered in the city of Santa Marta, the geographical coverage of the project extended from the municipality of Cienaga, (department of Magdalena), to the village of Palomino, (department of La Guajira), along approximately 200 kilometers of coastline. The project included 15-20 fishing villages/communities and benefited over 2,000 people directly.

The aim of the project was to strengthen the small-scale fishing sector. Specific goals included improving the standard of living for the fishermen and their families and implementing sustainable management techniques to halt the depletion of the local fisheries. The overarching strategy of Project CESPA was to build a regional cooperative of small-scale fishermen and build a full-service "CESPA center" that would -service the cooperative. The center was to include a wholesale fish market, an ice plant, a fishing supplies store, and a mechanics shop. The idea behind the cooperative was to pool resources of the fishermen to build economies of scale that would facilitate commercialization of fish to local and regional markets while protecting the fisheries from over-fishing.

The cooperative was to be built on the local organization of "committees" of fishermen, each of which was encouraged to organize formally to improve efficiency through rational planning and organization. The committees in turn formed part of a regional federation of small-scale fishermen, the first of its kind in Colombia. Integrated development initiatives were pursued with the committees and included environmental health projects for water sanitation and micro-enterprise development opportunities for women and children that were either tied to or unrelated to fishing.

Three important contextual factors that influenced the project were: the socio-political situation, the socio-economic conditions of the fishing communities, and the environmental degradation of the fisheries. On the socio-political front, the principal challenge was to build a regional organization of fishermen that spans a region dominated by leftist guerrillas (south of Santa Marta), and another region dominated by an institutionalized para-military organization (north of Santa Marta). Much was made of our decision to schedule training modules in accounting in the fishing communities in the south with participation from fishermen from the north.

As is so often the case, the attempt to foster sustainable management of the fisheries was limited principally by the poverty of the fishermen. Commercial over-fishing of the region, combined with limited income-generating opportunities, induced the small-scale fishermen to employ devastating techniques of extraction, including the dynamiting of coral reefs and the use of illegal nets. Prior to Project CESPA, the clear trend was the complete degradation of the resource and the prospect of a full collapse of the fishery.

I was hired in April of 1994 as Operations Coordinator for the final phase of Project CESPA. Shortly after my arrival, I became acting executive director and was charged with the twin objectives of consolidating the successes of the project’s prior four years of operations and assure the sustainability of the project into the future. I was instrumental in the resuscitation and redesign of the project as an environmental enterprise.

A brief history of Project CESPA in necessary prior to focusing on the institutional change that occurred in the final phase of the project in 1994. Early on in the life of Project CESPA, project planners successfully designed and implemented a grassroots solution to a complex problem. The critical element was the participatory involvement of the fishermen in the strategic, organizational, and technical elements of the project. Later on, changes in project leadership, (the Colombian NGO representing small-scale fishermen was replaced by a Colombian government organization), shifted Project CESPA’s strategy away from participatory development towards paternalism. One clear sign of failure was the mismanagement of the revolving loan fund; scores of fishermen lined up in the project’s office to receive "free money". The project implemented no controls to assure that these fishermen were beneficiaries of the project, had business plans, or that they had the intention of repaying the loans.

In 1994, Project CESPA was dead on the water. Morale among the employees and fishermen was at an all time low. The fishing federation was divided and unraveling. The capital investments in the CESPA center were delayed and serious infrastructure problems prevented operation of the center.

Though the problems were painfully obvious to an outsider, the decline of Project CESPA was accepted as inevitable by the project leadership. The implicit strategy for the final phase of the project was to minimize expenditures and maximize public relations. The CESPA center was inaugurated publicly with fanfare, despite the fact that there was no part of the center in operation in the present or near future. Furthermore, the CESPA center had no plan for sustaining its operations after Project CESPA would end.

Ultimately, the explicit risk of such a strategy was to squander four years of investments in capital and human resources. Simply put, the shift to a paternalistic development approach, the careless mismanagement of resources, and the lack of a business plan were in combination a guarantee that the project’s advances would be lost once Project CESPA’s subsidies ended. The net expected result would be that the fishermen would splinter off into their isolated groups once again and, under extreme pressures of poverty, return to ecologically unsustainable fishing techniques.

The key to the transformation of Project CESPA to Corporation CESPA, a for-profit entity of the fishing federation and local, public development agencies, was the simple, yet powerful paradigm shift from a subsidized project model to a self-financing business model. Given the task of creating a mechanism for Project CESPA to sustain itself into the future, it was my initiative to return to the project’s beneficiaries and employees to craft such a solution.

In essence, the change process keyed on three elements. The first was the vision that CESPA would indeed continue after the Italians pulled out. Second, we involved the fishermen directly in the planning process of the final phase of the project. Third, and as a result of the first two, the fishermen designed Corporation CESPA and negotiated the transfer of ownership and management responsibilities of the CESPA center and the revolving loan fund to Corporation CESPA.

The bottom line was that the fishermen convinced Project CESPA’s leadership to convert Project CESPA into a business run for and by the fishermen.

As mentioned above, the key changes in the transformation were the creation of an environmental enterprise that had the explicit mission of providing full services to the small-scale fishing sector while sustaining these services through the generation of economic profits. The key elements were the structuring of the corporation such that Project CESPA’s leadership would trust in the capacity of the fishermen to manage the business and then the transfer of ownership and responsibilities to Corporation CESPA. It should be noted that much of the institutional capacity-building necessary to make Corporation CESPA work had been promoted and accomplished by Project CESPA.

Corporation CESPA continues today, though its situation is extremely vulnerable. Strapped for cash, CESPA as a business never really got off the ground and is fighting to stay afloat in a challenging market. Like any start-up, CorCESPA needed time and money to build its operational capacity. However, the final phase of Project CESPA only enabled the structuring of the corporation; no time and no financial resources were available to help CorCESPA’s initial months as a fledgling business.

Overall, the critical issue is why Project CESPA failed to invest in building the business of CESPA during four years of work. Resources that were mismanaged could have been allocated to working capital requirements, for example, to give CorCESPA a boost in its challenging first few years of operation.

As it stood a year ago at the time of my last visit, Ricardo Alvarez, president of the Guachaca fishing committee and vice-president of the regional fishing federation FEPESNOMAG, was managing Corporation CESPA, which continued to struggle for its financial life. The ice plant and the fishing supplies store generate revenue and serve the fishermen. The wholesale marketing of fish, the supposed bread-and-butter of the CESPA center, has been erratic due to fluctuations and uncertainties in both the supply and demand for fish. Meanwhile, CorCESPA continues to promote local and regional organization and provides technical training in sustainable fishing techniques.

The principal lesson learned from this case is that sustainable development initiatives, those that balance ecological concerns with issues of economics (poverty), will only be successful if they are sustainable financially. International development projects that do not create mechanisms to sustain operations financially are destined to die, and thereby sacrifice significant gains at the community and environmental level.

Project CESPA also teaches us that community-based natural resource management can work. Few believed that sustainable development was possible with poor, independent, and geographically isolated fishermen. This case shows that fishermen, when supported with integrated development initiatives and included in the planning process, can and will manage fisheries in a sustainable fashion.

Furthermore, the case reminds us as development practitioners of the critical role of beneficiaries in designing and implementing their own solutions to development problems. The case also illustrates nicely the potential positive role of development experts as facilitators and catalysts in the change process and the undermining impact of a paternalistic approach.

In an era of decentralization, privatization, and a diminished role for multi-lateral agencies in the development process, the case of Project CESPA is a powerful example of the continuing need to shift the development paradigm from a project focus to a business model. Environmental enterprises can work, as the CESPA case demonstrates. But they will work much better if we build our environmental enterprises from day one.