Toward Sustainable Lake Ecosystem-Based Management: Lessons Learned from Interdisciplinary Research of Cage Aquaculture Management in Lake Maninjau

Abstract

Understanding appropriate governance arrangements for managing cage aquaculture systems in tropical lakes is essential, yet it is still overlooked by current studies. Here we discuss the lessons obtained from our interdisciplinary research (environmental–social science, ecology, and ecological economics) evaluating cage aquaculture management scenarios with the aim of facilitating sustainable cage aquaculture management in Lake Maninjau, Indonesia. The lessons we present are based on our analysis of why current management fails to achieve its goals of reduced cage aquaculture and improved water quality in the lake, despite the presence of formal regulations for reaching these goals. The importance of understanding the social, ecological, and economic dimensions in designing management actions is highlighted. We discuss how our research framework embraces methodological and epistemological differences between natural and social scientists to improve research integration and how it supports an adaptive research approach to studying (interventions in) complex ecosystems. We compare the relative advantages of our framework with well-established interdisciplinary conceptual and research frameworks revealing that it fulfills pertinent knowledge gaps through detailing the process of discipline integration, embracing epistemological pluralism, and explicitly including the quantification of ecosystem-services trade-offs, uncertainties, and risks in the decision-making process. Finally, we use the lessons from applying our framework to propose a more integrated management action plan in the lake. We expect that the lessons in this research can be widely applied to other cage aquaculture management case studies and contribute to the development of inland water ecosystem management in Indonesia and other Global South Countries.