Browsing by Subject "Commons"

Despite decades of study, the question of how to achieve sustainable small-scale fisheries is unresolved. Because small-scale fishing is diverse and hard to control, one management approach places fishers at the center of decision-making. Common-pool resource theory has assembled a large body of evidence that resource users, without top-down state control, are able to devise and enforce rules that lead to long-term sustainable resource harvest. The social and ecological characteristics (“design principles”) are well known for systems where this collective action is predicted to spontaneously emerge. However, it is poorly known what precipitates collective action when these design principles are absent. This dissertation draws insights about this question from a seemingly successful case from Baja California Sur, Mexico, where fishers have voluntarily created no-fishing areas (“Fish Refuges” or “Zonas de Refugio Pesquero”) in collaboration with the government fisheries agency and a non-governmental organization, Niparajá, in the absence of the design principles. This work is based on an in-depth study of these Fish Refuges including 180 days in the field from 2016-2018, participant observation, informal interviews, journaling, and semi-structured interviews (n=66). First, I found that collective action was possible because stakeholders had three competing visions about what the Fish Refuges were, each associated with criteria and evidence of whether the Fish Refuges were effective. This implies that policy flexibility to accommodate competing goals and evaluation criteria could facilitate collaboration for fisheries management. Second, I found that fishers’ knowledge was integrated in a process that did not recognize its legitimacy though what I call “ping-pong hybridization”, where the locus of decision making moved between stakeholders who could draw on their own knowledge systems. This implies that policies may be able to integrate multiple knowledge systems if the locus of decision-making moves back and forth. Third, I found that the property rights regime change away from de facto open access was possible because fishers were able to trade formal fishing rights for informal management rights, closing a fishing area to gain government trust and partnership. This work implies that insecure, unofficial, and tenuous property rights may be a first step of property rights regime change to achieve sustainable fisheries. In conclusion, bottom-up approaches to fisheries management may benefit from processes where different stakeholders can define the goals and methods used, and draw on their own knowledge systems to assess success. Shifts away from open access may be precipitated when fishers demand decision-making rights, even if these rights are tenuous.

Historically, the wind has functioned in multiple capacities, both physically and symbolically. The following study explores the ways in which natural history, myth and folklore, craft knowledge, and religion contributed to a growing body of knowledge about the wind at a moment in British history when wind knowledge assumed unprecedented political and economic significance. How did people come to know the wind and to narrate and communicate wind knowledge in the seventeenth century? What work did these complex and competing narrations perform? And what do they make visible? In pursuing these lines of inquiry, my work brings together three principle bodies of knowledge: Environmental History, History of Science, and British Imperial history; and it draws upon documents that include scientific treatises, written records of oral anecdotes and weather wising, religious sermons, travel narratives, fictional novels, and imperial correspondence. I argue that because the wind and wind knowledge were ubiquitous to the emerging success and identity of the British empire, a great variety of historical actors sought to control and narrate what wind knowledge was, where it came from, and what political work it should do. These efforts were unequivocally rooted in first hand experience and observation of the wind--maker's knowledge--and created what I call an intellectual commons that enabled commoners as well as elites to shape and briefly control the contours of wind knowledge in early Modern Britain and its expanding empire.