Towards Collaborative Coastal Management in Sri Lanka? A study of Special Area Management planning in Sri Lanka's coastal region

Sammanfattning: This thesis is concerned with the efforts to bring about a greater degree of local community participation in the use and management of Sri Lanka's coastal land and natural resources. Through the application of the Special Area Management (SAM) strategy in geographically distinct areas along the coast, the aim is to create collaborative arrangements - partnerships - that will enable coastal communities and local governments to work together with the Sri Lankan state and share responsibility and authority over the management of coastal land and natural resources. Using a political-geographical perspective that highlights the political and spatial dimensions of this shift in forms for governing the coast, the thesis seeks to identify and discuss factors that can have a bearing on the participatory dimension of collaborative coastal management in Sri Lanka. The thesis focuses particularly on factors influencing the role played by the local communities and the degree to which they actually come to share authority with respect to the use and management of coastal natural resources as envisioned in the SAM strategy. The thesis illustrates that, despite an ambition to bring about a sharing of authority and control in costal management, this has not quite worked out in practice. Due to circumstances relating both to the SAM strategy itself and to the context in which it is implemented, the degree to which coastal communities have gained any degree of influence with respect to the management of coastal land and resources remains questionable. The study is carried out prior to the tsunami that hit the Sri Lankan shores in December 2004. However, given the major reconstruction of Sri Lanka's coast that currently is ongoing and the controversy that surrounds it, the issues raised in this thesis are highly relevant.