Building bridges: lessons from the Arnavon Management Committee, Solomon Islands

Organisational arrangements to coordinate and facilitate community action can be crucial to the functioning of equitable and sustainable resource management systems. This point has been well established in over a decade of research on common property resource management (Berkes and Farvar 1989, Alcorn 1995, Berkes and Folke 1998, Ostrom 1998, Ostrom 1999) and social capital (summarised by Flora et al 2000). Organisational arrangements intersect other crucial facets of sustainable community-based natural resource management, including opportunities for ecologically and economically sustainable development and capacity building (see Keen and Lal, this issue). The question of how organisational arrangements for communitybased natural resource management may deal with wider scale issues is starting to receive attention (see Ostrom 1999). This is an important area for further reflection and research, because in many cases coordination beyond a specific settlement or user group may be needed to secure the sustainable management of resources. The social capital of a community refers broadly to the resources embedded in social structures and processes that can be tapped for purposeful actions. These resources can be channelled towards sustainable resource management, and they include the rules and norms that guide and motivate individuals, and the organisational arrangements that facilitate community cohesion, interaction and joint action (Lin 2001). When resource management issues involve a number of different user communities and non-resident stakeholders (such as government and other interest groups), the capacity to build networks between the various communities also becomes important. Coordination between various resource-using communities may be necessary to avoid resource depletion. Government agencies and other stakeholders can support local initiatives through policy and legislation, as well as by mobilising additional resources to deal with the issues at hand. These links and relationships between various participants have been referred to as ‘bridging capital’ (Flora et al 2000). This article examines the case of a ‘bridging institution’, the Arnavon Marine Conservation Area Management Committee (AMC). The AMC oversees the management of the Arnavon Islands Marine Conservation Area in Isabel province, Solomon Islands. The discussion is based on field research undertaken over 1998 and 1999. During this trip, interviews were conducted with individual AMC members, observations were made during an AMC meeting, and a workshop was held as part of the meeting to explore the functioning of the AMC with its members. The marine conservation area and the formation of the AMC