Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes the tense, interdependent relationship between Vylkovchany fishers and Danube Biosphere Reserve administrators, and the mutual learning that occurred as they negotiated access to fisheries amidst changing property relations and contradictory regulation after socialism’s end.

Paper long abstract:

Between 2014 and 2016 Ukraine’s Danube Biosphere Reserve (DBR) administrators devoted extensive time to two lawsuits in which they defended the legality of commercial fisheries in reserve territory. Since the late 1990s, DBR administrators have managed fisheries as a kind of limited-access common pool resource that gives priority to fishers from the Danube Delta town of Vylkove and nearby villages. In both lawsuits parties claimed that the conduct of fisheries in the DBR violated Ukraine’s 1992 protected areas law. Although DBR administrators lost their cases and had to rezone the Reserve in order to allow local fishers to continue fishing legally, litigation helped defend local fishing commons against further enclosure by environmentalists, state officials and outside business people, and to limit officials’ predatory behavior.

This paper draws on interviews, participant observation, and documents pertaining to these events in order to analyze the evolution of a tense, interdependent relationship between Vylkovchany fishers and DBR administrators and mutual learning that occurred as they negotiated access to Danube fisheries amidst changing property relations and the proliferation of contradictory environmental regulation. For example, administrators and hydrobiologists recognize fishers’ claims that their stewardship helped give the Danube Delta its current form and species-diverse ecologies and testified that fishing is an ‘environment-forming factor’ in court. This account thus illuminates an idiosyncratic yet positive case of administrators’ use of domestic law and global conservation norms to balance nature conservation and residents’ fishing livelihoods in a chronically under-funded post-Soviet state-run biosphere reserve during a politically volatile period.