Capacity Assessment for Integrated Coastal Management in India

Abstract

The coastal areas of India are getting greater importance in recent years, owing to increasing human population, urbanization and accelerated developmental activities. These anthropogenic activities have created conflict between physical, environmental and human dimensions.  Systematic knowledge and understanding of various dimensions of the coastal area shall guide for wise use of coastal resources, resolving human-induced problems, and improving governance systems. Integrated coastal management (ICM) is conceived as a holistic management tool working across sectoral, disciplinary, and institutional boundaries.  Any program aimed at integrated management of the coastal zone is to meet and overcome the challenges of building up and anchoring new institutional, technical, and administrative capacity. 

Capacity development on integrated management and planning are recently initiated at academic level in India.  UNDP defines capacity development as “the process through which individuals, organisations and societies obtain, strengthen and maintain the capabilities to set and achieve their own development objectives over time.  A capacity assessment provides a comprehensive perspective on capacities critical to the achievement of development objectives. Capacity need analysis are offering desired future capacities against current capacities and offers a systematic way of gathering critical knowledge and information on capacity asset.  Capacity assessment on Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICM) in India has been conducted by surveying published literatures through data mining from databases.  In total seven thousand three hundred and fifty six indexed research papers which were published in Indias’ coastal areas between the years 1977 and 2008 were assessed for capacity need assessment purpose.  The literatures were classified under sixteen subject heads which are the essential components of ICM planning process.  The subject clusters were further classified into five levels viz., introductory level, process level, decision level, sustainable coastal zone management level, and innovative level.  Researches where does not happened on the particular subjects were classified as “no evidence of research”. 

Based on the content of the literature and a skill map prepared, it is found that the literatures are mostly under introductory level and they are mostly on science subjects with few on socio-economic and management subjects.  Considering the outcome of this literature survey and capacity analysis, the World Bank has accepted for financial assistance to establish National Centre for Sustainable Coastal Management at Chennai, India.  The process of ICM capacity analysis in India is described in this paper.