Building sustainable governance: Interactive governance and the wellbeing of the coastal poor

The full title of this project is „Building Capacity for Sustainable Governance in South Asian Fisher-ies: Poverty, Wellbeing and Deliberative Policy Networks’ which has been shortened to ‘Building Sustainable Governance’ (BSG). It is a pilot project funded by the ESPA programme managed by the UK NERC (Natural Environment Research Council) and it runs for one year between February 2009 and February 2010. The purpose of the BSG is to bring together a range of scientific, policy and political actors involved in the fisheries sector in South Asia to explore the extent to which they are able and interested to participate in deliberative policy networks. It is intended that these networks will seek to generate and direct a future programme of research and capacity building in an effort to advance new forms of policy and management solution in fisheries which accommodate conflicts between ecosystem sustainability and poverty alleviation objectives. The project involves three workshops to explore the feasibil-ity of establishing deliberative policy networks in Sri Lanka and South India. The project draws from two emergent bodies of research experience: work on Wellbeing in developing countries (McGregor 2004, Gough and McGregor 2007) and Interactive Governance in fisher-ies (Bavinck et al 2005, Kooiman and Bavinck 2005).