Fishers’ responses to the Danish seiner ban and the history of fisheries governance on the Java north coast

In 2015, the Indonesian government announced that it would prohibit the operation of the so-called cantrang (Danish Seine). The stated purpose of the cantrang ban was to make marine fisheries more environmentally sustainable. In response, cantrang fishers along the north coast of Java staged mass protests, and after 3 years of negotiations and uncertainty, the government exempted the cantrang fleets on the Java north coast from the policy. This paper analyses fishers’ responses to the ban from a historical and ethnographic perspective. Specifically, it compares the cantrang ban to two earlier government interventions in the fisheries on the Java north coast, one in 1905, the second 1980/81. With each intervention, a new governance principle was introduced to small-scale fisheries, established elites transferred their capital elsewhere, and new elites emerged who supported the new principle locally. Since 2015, however, only very few members of the established elites have exited the cantrang fishery, and no members of a new local elite have emerged yet who would support sustainability as a governance principle for fisheries. The paper aims to clarify why this was the case. More generally, it suggests that understanding the history of fisheries governance on the Java north coast requires attention to the role of local elites, and therefore to social differentiations among fishers.