ORIGINAL RESEARCH Examining the Role of Social Capital in Community Collective Action for Sustainable Wetland Fisheries in Bangladesh H. M. Tuihedur Rahman & Gordon M. Hickey & Swapan K. Sarker Received: 21 May 2014 /Accepted: 22 January 2015 # Society of Wetland Scientists 2015 Abstract Internationally, the decentralization of property rights is becoming an increasingly common policy interven- tion for sustainable natural resource management. In the con- text of decentralized wetland fisheries policy in Bangladesh, this paper examines the role that social capital plays in coop- eration building and collective action among diverse house- holds seeking to obtain fisheries property rights. It considers how some households are able to develop collective action in the form of a community-based organization to access wetland fisheries, and why other households are not. Using the Local Level Institution (LLI) study technique, our analysis high- lights that the financial capacity of community members plays a crucial role in accessing resources when the government’ s decentralization policy also seeks to generate State revenue through fees. In this situation, information access and commu- nication with external agencies were found to be prerequisites for earning the wetland fisheries property rights, with local leaders able to take advantage of their position to dictate col- lective decision making. This situation resulted in undemo- cratic decentralization and devolution of wetland fisheries rights, undermining transparency, accountability and the equi- table distribution of natural resources. Keywords Formal and informal institutions . Decentralization . Leadership . Sustainable natural resource management . Sustainable livelihoods Introduction Internationally, the decentralization of property rights is be- coming an increasingly common policy intervention for sus- tainable natural resource management (Larson and Ribot 2004 ; Ribot et al. 2010 ; Rahman et al. 2012 ). In Bangladesh, the decentralization of wetland resource manage- ment has been occurring since 1986, when the first wetland fisheries management policy was developed to ensure com- munity participation (Sultana and Thompson 2008 ). Subsequently, the process of decentralization has followed a formal hierarchal structure which encourages community par- ticipation through the development of community-based fish- er organizations in order to formally obtain (temporary) wet- land fisheries property rights (Rahman and Begum 2010; Rahman et al. 2012). This decentralization process can be explained from both formal and informal institutional perspectives. To date, formal institutional decentralization in the governance of H. M. T. Rahman (*) : G. M. Hickey Department of Natural Resource Sciences, Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, McGill University, Macdonald Campus, 21,111 Lakeshore Road, Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue H9X 3V9, Canada e-mail: hm.rahman@mail.mcgill.ca G. M. Hickey e-mail: gordon.hickey@mcgill.ca H. M. T. Rahman : S. K. Sarker Department of Forestry and Environmental Science, School of Agriculture and Mineral Science, Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Sylhet 3114, Bangladesh S. K. Sarker e-mail: s.sarker.1@research.gla.ac.uk S. K. Sarker e-mail: swapan-fes@sust.edu S. K. Sarker Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health & Comparative Medicine (IBAHCM), College of Medical, Veterinary & Life Sciences, University of Glasgow, Graham Kerr Building, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK Wetlands DOI 10.1007/s13157-015-0635-5