Paper short abstract:

After becoming a UNESCO biosphere reserve in 1991, the Danube Delta fishing communities experience an acute social and environmental degradation due to weak law enforcement and marginalization of local knowledge and participation.

Paper long abstract:

In 1991, the Danube Delta, the largest marshland in Europe, famous for its biodiversity, became a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. Due to this designation, new regulations concerning local use of the environment have been imposed by the Romanian government and the European Union. Relying on participant observation, in-depth interviews and oral histories as main research methods, this paper scrutinizes from a cultural anthropologic perspective the changes occurred in the local patterns of natural resource use before (1880s-1950s), during (1960s-1980s) and after communism (1989). The findings discusses how the resource exploitation of Danube Delta has been under constant transformation, from capitalist system, to communist one, and back to capitalism combined with "green" policies today.

The second part of the research focuses on the present practices pointing to the locals' perceptions of the environmental discourse. The rigid top-down approach excludes locals from management and participation. Furthermore, it seems that personal agenda of the authorities weights more than the rule of law, and therefore locals from the Danube Delta Biosphere Reserve see democracy and environmental protection rules as a means for people in key positions to have a monopoly over the highly valued resources of the protected areas, which they profit from in illicit ways.

Consequently, the present research argues that due to the new environmental policy-making, that systematically ignored the local participation, and due to the weak law enforcement in the context of post-communist context, the fishing communities living inside this UNESCO Biosphere Reserve experience an acute social and environmental degradation today.