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 beensuffering from the proliferation of tilapia cage culture practices. The area around the lake isinhabited 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-facesemi-structured interviews, this paper aims to understand the challenges for the development ofenvironmentally sustainable cage culture farming. Our institutional analysis reveals that the mainchallenges are low levels of trust between communities and officials, and conflicting formal andinformal institutions which have prevented the emergence of strong rules-in-use. This isa particularly interesting theoretical contribution to the literature on the management of com-mon pool resources (CPR), as our case study is an example of private property farming ina 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 governmentrelated 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 inother lakes in Indonesia and countries of the Global South