Wetlands provide a special case in point. They are used by fisherfolk, hunters, charcoal makers, pastoralists and agriculturalists under traditional resource sharing regimes at different seasons, and also harbour a wide variety of fauna and flora. Ensuring compatibility among such a wide set of users poses special challenges. Conventional access rights are particularly hard to define, since water levels are not the same each year and patterns of flooding are erratic. Even the most elaborate traditional arrangements seldom extend to upstream water users, often leading to over-extraction or pollution by industrial or agricultural users. This has severe consequences on downstream fisheries resources
