Browsing by Subject "Natural resource management"

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.

Coastal plain ponds are an understudied and threatened wetland ecosystem with many unique environmental attributes. Research in these ponds can investigate species-environment relationships, while simultaneously providing ecosystem-specific information crucial to their continued conservation and management. This dissertation explores patterns in coastal plain pond vegetation composition and species-environment relationships across space, through time, and in the seed bank and standing vegetation.

In a two-year field study at 18 coastal plain ponds across the island of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, I investigated species-environment relationships within and among ponds. I identified vegetation species presences and abundances within 1 m2 quadrats, which ran continuously along transects established perpendicular to the water's edge. Species data were analyzed against local and landscape-scale environmental data. I also conducted a one-year seed bank study in which sediments from four coastal plain ponds were incubated in growth chambers and composition was compared to the standing vegetation. One hundred and thirty-four plant species were identified during vegetation sampling and 38 species were identified from incubated sediments.

I found significant compositional change across space in response to environmental gradients, with patterns in species composition occurring at both local and landscape scales. Elevation was the only local factor strongly correlated with species composition. Significant landscape-scale environmental factors included surficial geology and pond water salinity. Species composition was significantly correlated with hydrologic regime in 2005 but not in 2006. Overall patterns in vegetation species composition and abundance were more closely related to landscape-scale environmental variables than to local environmental variables.

I also found that coastal plain ponds undergo significant compositional change from one year to the next. Interannual variability disproportionately affected certain ponds and quadrats more than others, highlighting patterns in the relationships between compositional change and environmental attributes. Specifically, ephemeral ponds, ponds located on the moraine, ponds with high specific conductance values, and quadrats located closer to the waterline exhibited greater compositional change from 2005 to 2006 than permanent ponds, ponds located on the outwash plain, ponds with low specific conductance values, and quadrats located further from the waterline.

Finally, I found that coastal plain ponds exhibit a low degree of similarity between composition in sediments and standing vegetation. More species were identified in the standing vegetation than in the seed bank, and in most cases average species richness per quadrat was higher in the standing vegetation than in the seed bank. Seed bank and standing vegetation samples from ponds with different surficial geology were compositionally distinct. Seed bank samples from permanent and ephemeral ponds were compositionally distinct whereas standing vegetation samples were not.

The protection of global biodiversity and the conservation of the earth’s natural resources are paramount to future wellbeing of mankind. Humans are a hugely influential part of the global ecosystem, and the ways in which we use, create, and change global biodiversity patterns are as important to understand as the ways in which those patterns function without our interference. Of more specific importance is an understanding of the ways in which human values, behaviors and practices (especially those surrounding leadership, management, and finance) relating to biodiversity management can be helpful or harmful as we attempt to meet our self-determined goals of global conservation.

To that end, the first chapter of this dissertation focuses on the potential influence of leadership and management on outcomes in wildlife reintroduction programs. Wildlife reintroductions and translocations are statistically unlikely to succeed. Nevertheless, they remain a critical part of conservation because they are the only way to actively restore a species into a habitat from which it has been extirpated. Past efforts to improve these practices have attributed the low success rate to failures in the biological knowledge (e.g., ignorance of social behavior, poor release site selection), or to the inherent challenges of reinstating a species into an area where threats have already driven it to local extinction. Such research presumes that the only way to improve reintroduction outcomes is through improved biological knowledge. This emphasis on biological solutions may have caused researchers to overlook the potential influence of other factors on reintroduction outcomes. I employed a grounded theory approach to study the leadership and management of a successful reintroduction program (the Sea Eagle Recovery Project in Scotland, UK) and identify four critical managerial elements that I theorize may have contributed to the successful outcome of this 50-year reintroduction. These elements are:

(i) Leadership & Management: Small, dedicated team of accessible experts who provide strong political and scientific advocacy (“champions”) for the project.

(ii) Hierarchy & Autonomy: Hierarchical management structure that nevertheless permits high individual autonomy.

(iii) Goals & Evaluation: Formalized goal-setting and regular, critical evaluation of the project’s progress toward those goals.

(iv) Adaptive Public Relations: Adaptive outreach campaigns that are open, transparent, inclusive (esp. linguistically), and culturally relevant.

This study represents an initial, but valuable inquiry into the ways in which leadership and management can impact programmatic (and therefore, biodiversity) outcomes.

The second chapter of this dissertation explores the potential relationship between financial mechanisms and outcomes in non-governmental biodiversity conservation programs. Although local laws, trends, and markets forces often shape the specific laws and market conditions under which conservation transactions occur, focusing analysis on the broader mechanisms of transfer may provide new opportunities to identify patterns, improve efficiency, and link transfer mechanisms to conservation outcomes.

Through a series of seven brief, descriptive case studies built around interviews with senior officers at US non-governmental organizations, this chapter seeks to highlight potential linkages between inflows of conservation dollars, financial mechanisms used to transfer them to conservation actors/entities/organizations, and eventual outflows of conservation dollars into measurable outcomes. This chapter also presents a preliminary framework for categorizing mechanisms and predicting their impacts on availability and outflow of conservation dollars. Although the framework fails to predict all outcomes, its failure highlights several emergent themes in the impact of financial mechanism, including:

(i) longer time horizons of funding availability can decrease the value of conservation investments, but increase accountability

(ii) time-bound (or time-limited) funding mechanisms can create uncertainty and decrease investment in program outcomes

(iii) mechanisms granting greater control to donors/investors can decrease the autonomy and adaptability of conservation organizations, and can skew outcomes toward donor biases

We hope that these results are useful as a first step toward the greater consideration of financial mechanisms in conservation planning and financial analysis.

The third chapter of this dissertation applies principles of the first two chapters as part of an in-depth look at one conservation initiative: the Anne K. Taylor Fund’s Boma Fortification Program, taking place in Narok County, Kenya. In the pastoral steppe of East Africa, lions (Panthera leo) kill livestock. The subsequent lethal retaliation by livestock owners has helped reduce lion numbers by more than 80% and driven it from most of its historic range. This conflict is especially intense along the western edge of the Maasai Mara National Reserve in Kenya, where some of the densest lion and livestock populations in Africa overlap.

We evaluated the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of implementation for one proposed solution – the Anne K. Taylor Fund’s subsidized construction of fortified, chain-link livestock fences (‘bomas’) – in reducing livestock loss to depredation. We collected 375 predation reports from 308 semi-structured household interviews and predation records. We used these data to study the impact of subsidised boma fortification on the depredation of cattle, sheep and goats. Of 179 fortified bomas, 67% suffered no losses over one year; of 60 unfortified bomas, only 15% had no losses over one year. Furthermore, losses of greater than five animals per year occurred at only 17% of fortified bomas, compared to 57% of unfortified bomas. The overall reduction in losses to predation at fortified bomas equated to savings of more than $1,200 USD per household per year, but with a return on investment of 778%, partially fortified bomas are vastly more cost effective than fully fortified bomas (return on investment = 349%).

However, the broad applicability of the boma fortification approach is uncertain, as its financial structure relies heavily on a single large donor to act as subsidizing entity. This single-supplier approach introduces cost inefficiencies, as well as supply chain vulnerabilities. Future fortification programs should consider alternative decentralized approaches to strengthen supply lines and scale the solution.

These chapters collectively represent a thorough examination of the human dimensions of conservation – and the ways in which leadership, management, finance, and valuation can contribute to harmful or helpful outcomes in the effort to preserve global biodiversity.

This dissertation explores decision problems faced by organizations willing to address or support the incorporation of sustainability aspects on their "business as usual" activities. We study to specific problems. First, we analyze the decision problem of a forest manager who, in addition to selling timber, has the option of selling carbon offsets for the carbon sequestered by the forest. We study both the single-rotation and the multiple-rotations harvesting problems, and develop stochastic dynamic programming models to find the optimal harvesting and offset-selling policy, the expected optimal harvesting time, and the expected optimal reward under different offset-trading schemes. Then, we study the case in which an organization (sustainability buyer) outsources sustainability efforts to another organization (sustainability seller). While buyers cannot directly exert sustainability efforts, they can provide economic or technical support to their sellers in order to incentivize these efforts. We investigate how the effort and support decisions change according to characteristics of stakeholders, buyers, and sellers. Considering that buyers can compete on the sustainability effort exerted by their sellers, we extend our analysis to the case of competing buyers, and we determine conditions under which sharing sellers is preferred by the buyers to having separate sellers for each buyer.

In 2004, a report from the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy documented a broad range of ecological problems in U.S. ocean waters, including declining fish stocks, changes in marine biodiversity, coastal habitat loss, and hypoxic "dead zones," as well as related governance problems, such as uncoordinated and contradictory laws, underfunded programs, and conflicts between local, state, and federal priorities. The Commission's recommendations for improvement revolved around the themes of ecosystem-based management, improved agency coordination, and regional flexibility.

One recommendation in particular stated that, "Congress ... should establish a balanced, ecosystem-based offshore management regime that sets forth guiding principles for the coordination of offshore activities." Five years later, President Obama instructed an interagency taskforce to develop a "framework for effective coastal and marine spatial planning" to help achieve the goals of that recommendation and, in 2012, nine Regional Planning Bodies were established to begin the planning process.

Not everyone has embraced marine spatial planning (MSP) as a desirable next step in ocean management. Some ocean industries worry that MSP could interfere with economic priorities. New users, such as offshore windfarm developers, fear that extended planning will further delay their activities. Members of Congress have complained that MSP policy lacks adequate legislative underpinnings. Still others worry

that MSP may be a solution in search of a problem, diverting money and attention away from more immediate ocean challenges. Equally worrisome, the policy research community has yet to provide solid theoretical or historical support for the presumed efficacy of MSP in U.S. ocean waters. In light of the recent, rapid adoption of MSP and the questions surrounding it, more rigorous examination is in order.

This study contributes to that examination in two ways. First, it places MSP within the broader context of research and practice in fields such as policy analysis, common-pool resource theory, institutional analysis, planning and design, community engagement, and conflict resolution. Second, it looks at the history of U.S. public lands--a public space that has been accommodating multiple uses and conservation for over a century--as a comparative model.

This approach results in three research questions:

1) Are U.S. public lands and the U.S. EEZ sufficiently similar, based on characteristics most relevant to policy analysis, that successes and failures in one arena might be relevant to the other?

2) If so, has over a hundred years of active public land management in the U.S. produced any lessons for success that might be applicable to the more recently developing field of ocean management, particularly with respect to multiple-use planning and management? and

3) If the settings are similar in meaningful ways, and if lessons can be distilled from public lands management, how might these be transposed, or operationalized to inform the current drive for more integrated ocean management, particularly through the tool of marine spatial planning?

A critical review and synthesis of U.S. public land studies, particularly regarding the history of the National Forests, comprises one important element of the study. This is supplemented with case studies, site visits, detailed analyses of government documents related to both land and ocean management, and extensive formal and informal interviews with key informants in the National Forest and ocean management communities.

The study results answer the first two questions in the affirmative and conclude that sustainable, multiple-use management of government-controlled spaces and resources inevitably requires tradeoffs between numerous competing objectives. These tradeoffs can rarely be resolved through objective decision analysis and will rely implicitly or explicitly on value judgments. Using forest history as a model, it appears that the most significant choices to be made by ocean policy makers will revolve around: 1) the scale of problem definition and resolution; 2) the relative emphasis on political, technocratic, judicial, or participatory decision-making; and 3) the extent of flexibility allowed. Specific suggestions are made for how elected officials, agency staff, environmental organizations, industry, and academia can approach ocean management in a way that reflects a variety of interests, advances understanding, and achieves sustainable and productive ocean ecosystems.

Sustainable management of marine natural resources, and the social-ecological systems in which they are embedded, presents one of the most significant challenges in contemporary environmental policy. Despite improvement in the ecological sustainability and economic performance of fisheries in the United States, these trends are not universal and management remains highly contentious. With fisheries moving towards more collaborative and participatory policy processes, understanding how social and economic relations among stakeholders may influence institutional change is critical to supporting democratic and effective resource management. This dissertation builds on research from common-pool resource theory and political economy to explore the incentives and processes of self-governance in fisheries embedded in global commercial supply chains and state management institutions. It contributes to our understanding of participatory policy-making by addressing the research questions: Why and how do resource users self-govern through the policy process? How are policy preferences and negotiations shaped by market structures and social relations of production?

These questions are investigated empirically by tracing market and policy changes over time in a commercial, small-scale, U.S. fishery. This dissertation examines origins and evolution of regulations, cooperative management institutions, and commercialization processes in the California sea urchin fishery, where harvesters and processors have seen major shifts in market geography and structure, and have initiated self-governance through the state’s policy process. Using a multi-level governance framework and institutional analysis tools, this dissertation draws on document archives, interviews and participant observation of policy and commercial production processes to construct a detailed policy history. It incorporates micro- and macro-level trade data and employs global value chain analyses to examine shifting seafood market geographies over time, and uniquely synthesizes the parallel economic and political timelines to explore dynamic interactions between them, focusing on how markets and other social and ecological factors shaped motivations in crafting policy.

Overall, this research reveals a diverse set of values and incentives at the heart of policy choice and change in the fishery. Cooperative management can be a tool to meet the costs of regulating (time, money, information and political leverage), evolving as participants learn and build social capital through the collective action experience, and adjust collective goals in response social and ecological change. States can empower effective producer collective action through particularly forms of institutional support, such as oversight to hold leaders accountable to members. Findings also reveal complex dynamic linkages between markets, harvesting strategies, and policy choice. Regulations are crafted to match market conditions, equitably distribute costs among divers, processors, and the state, and achieve other social objectives such as intergenerational access and individual freedom. They are also adjusted in response to changing markets, outcomes of previous regulations, and state policy agendas. Together, these findings can inform ongoing efforts to move towards participatory and cooperative fisheries management, particularly in the U.S. and similar contexts, by revealing the specific ways that commercial seafood markets shape, and are shaped by, the policy process and regulatory outcomes.

This dissertation presents three program evaluations in environmental and resource economics. In the first chapter, I ask whether rural roads can contribute to a reversal of tree cover loss. Prior literature shows roads to be strong drivers of deforestation; however, I hypothesize that in some settings the opposite relationship may hold. Roads may (1) increase the relative productivity of labor in non-agricultural sectors, reducing agricultural activity and allowing reforestation; (2) raise profits from forest management or plantations by linking markets, encouraging forest planting; and (3) provide access to imported fuel sources, reducing pressure on forests from firewood collection. I use a large-scale rural road construction program in India to explore these possibilities. I construct a nationwide, village-level panel, and estimate the impacts of roads on tree cover using a differences-in-differences approach. In aggregate I find that road construction contributed to tree cover expansion, in great contrast to the existing empirical road-forest literature. I also find considerable variation in road impacts across settings within India: frontier settings saw reductions in tree cover due to new roads, while less isolated settings with more established agriculture saw increases in tree cover.

In the second chapter, I apply similar quasi-experimental methods to a very different question: does rights-based fisheries management increase fish prices? Rights-based management, specifically “catch shares,” is known to extend fishing seasons by slowing the destructive “race to fish.” This reduces fishing costs. It may also increase fishing revenues, because longer fishing seasons reduce product gluts that depress prices. I test this hypothesis for the majority of U.S. catch share fisheries (all those with data available) using an individually matched control fishery for each treated, catch share fishery and a difference-in-differences approach. I find evidence for increased ex-vessel prices among fisheries that undergo season decompression; however, highly variable results suggest that there is a need for a richer theoretical understanding of transitions to rights-based management. I discuss effort substitution in multispecies fisheries systems as a possible explanation for this heterogeneity.

In the third chapter, I consider how environmentally beneficial actions can be incentivized by conditional payments (i.e. payments made in return for specific actions or outcomes) in collective land management settings. I use a framed field-lab experiment with participants from collective lands enrolled in a new payments for ecosystem services (PES) program in Mexico. I test the impact of increasing collective conditionality. Because social interactions are integral in collective decision-making, I also test the impact of PES design features that aim to improve group cooperation. Greater collective conditionality raised contributions, with higher impact on lower baseline contributors. Giving groups a way of participating in program rule-setting further improved their cooperation with those rules.

The purpose of this dissertation is to contribute to a better understanding of how global seafood trade interacts with the governance of small-scale fisheries (SSFs). As global seafood trade expands, SSFs have the potential to experience significant economic, social, and political benefits from participation in export markets. At the same time, market connections that place increasing pressures on resources pose risks to both the ecological and social integrity of SSFs. This dissertation seeks to explore the factors that mediate between the potential benefits and risks of global seafood markets for SSFs, with the goal of developing hypotheses regarding these relationships.

The empirical investigation consists of a series of case studies from the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico. This is a particularly rich context in which to study global market connections with SSFs because the SSFs in this region engage in a variety of market-oriented harvests, most notably for octopus, groupers and snappers, lobster, and sea cucumber. Variation in market forms and the institutional diversity of local-level governance arrangements allows the dissertation to explore a number of examples.

The analysis is guided primarily by common-pool resource (CPR) theory because of the insights it provides regarding the conditions that facilitate collective action and the factors that promote long-lasting resource governance arrangements. Theory from institutional economics and political ecology contribute to the elaboration of a multi-faceted conceptualization of markets for CPR theory, with the aim of facilitating the identification of mechanisms through which markets and CPR governance actually interact. This dissertation conceptualizes markets as sets of institutions that structure the exchange of property rights over fisheries resources, affect the material incentives to harvest resources, and transmit ideas and values about fisheries resources and governance.

The case studies explore four different mechanisms through which markets potentially influence resource governance: 1) Markets can contribute to costly resource governance activities by offsetting costs through profits, 2) markets can undermine resource governance by generating incentives for noncompliance and lead to overharvesting resources, 3) markets can increase the costs of resource governance, for example by augmenting monitoring and enforcement burdens, and 4) markets can alter values and norms underpinning resource governance by transmitting ideas between local resource users and a variety of market actors.

Data collected using participant observation, survey, informal and structured interviews contributed to the elaboration of the following hypotheses relevant to interactions between global seafood trade and SSFs governance. 1) Roll-back neoliberalization of fisheries policies has undermined cooperatives’ ability to achieve financial success through engagement with markets and thus their potential role as key actors in resource governance (chapter two). 2) Different relations of production influence whether local governance institutions will erode or strengthen when faced with market pressures. In particular, relations of production in which fishers own their own means of production and share the collective costs of governance are more likely to strengthen resource governance while relations of production in which a single entrepreneur controls capital and access to the fishery are more likely to contribute to the erosion of resource governance institutions in the face of market pressures (chapter three). 3) By serving as a new discursive framework within which to conceive of and talk about fisheries resources, markets can influence norms and values that shape and constitute governance arrangements.

In sum, the dissertation demonstrates that global seafood trade manifests in a diversity of local forms and effects. Whether SSFs moderate risks and take advantage of benefits depends on a variety of factors, and resource users themselves have the potential to influence the outcomes of seafood market connections through local forms of collective action.

This research evaluates the potential for regulatory measures governing oil palm plantation expansion, and corporate voluntary sustainability commitments in the oil palm industry, to contribute to forest protection and greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals at regional and national scales, using case studies from Indonesia and Gabon. Globally, agricultural production will need to increase by 60–110% by 2050, to meet anticipated demand for food, fiber and biofuels (Alexandratos and Bruinsma, 2012; Tilman et al., 2011). Achieving this increase without negative consequences for forests, biodiversity, and climate will require innovative solutions including increasing productivity, minimizing waste and inefficiencies, improving food distribution and access, shifting diet preferences, and optimizing land use (Foley et al., 2011; Godfray et al., 2010; Newton et al., 2013). Palm oil, which comprises 35% of global vegetable oil consumption, is emblematic of this challenge (Sayer et al., 2012). The production of palm oil is increasing more rapidly than any other oil crop, and an increasingly urban and wealthy global population is anticipated to drive further demand (Hertel, 2011). In Southeast Asia, where 87% of global palm oil production is currently concentrated, industrial-scale plantations nearly quadrupled in extent from 1990–2010 (Gunarso et al., 2013), and drove the conversion of millions of hectares of forest and peat lands (Carlson et al., 2013; Koh et al., 2011). There is therefore growing concern among environmental advocates that, if appropriate safeguards are not put in place, future expansion of oil palm cultivation will reflect historical patterns, leading to the continued destruction of biodiversity- and carbon-rich forest landscapes (Linder, 2013; Wich et al., 2014). In response to these concerns, government and private sector stakeholders have proposed or established policies aimed at minimizing the negative environmental consequences of oil palm production. Here, I investigate the potential impacts of these programs and policies by examining historical trends in industrial-scale oil palm plantation expansion patterns, predicting business-as-usual trajectories of future plantation expansion, and estimating the potential impacts of alternative policy scenarios on future plantation development, and on forests, peatlands, and carbon stocks. In Chapter 1, I provide background information on palm oil and its uses, cultivation requirements, production patterns, and documented environmental impacts. I additionally discuss actual or proposed government regulations and private sector sustainability initiatives that are relevant in the contexts of Indonesia and/or Gabon. In Chapter 2, I present an analysis of patterns of oil palm expansion, and impacts on forest and peat lands, in Indonesia from 1995–2015. In Chapter 3, I develop predictions of future Indonesian oil palm expansion under a range of policy scenarios, and provide estimates of the extent to which these scenarios will contribute to forest protection and concomitant CO2 emissions reductions. In Chapter 4, I evaluate the extent to which greenhouse gas emissions reductions in the oil palm sector will contribute to Indonesia’s national mitigation goals, given uncertainties in the current national greenhouse gas inventory system. In Chapter 5, I develop national suitability maps for oil palm cultivation in Gabon, a new frontier of oil palm expansion, and identify priority areas which have the potential to support production goals while protecting forest landscapes. Finally, I summarize findings across these studies, present next steps, and provide concluding remarks in Chapter 6.

Environmental governance refers to a number of possible arrangements and decision-making processes that aim to structure the activities of humans in relation to the environment or natural resources. Governing the world’s fisheries remains a complex and pressing challenge, one that must reconcile the interests of an increasingly diverse cast of actors, including fishers and post-harvest workers, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), scientists, local and national governments, and even global organizations like the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Projects to govern the world’s small-scale fisheries in particular face the challenging task of establishing order and regularity in what are dynamic and spatially dispersed activities that have socio-cultural, economic, political and ecological implications.

In Mexico, cooperativism is an important form of organization for small-scale fishers that is embedded in a long history of state-led development and intervention. Cooperatives form regional associations (federations), which in turn form national organizations (confederations). Federations and confederations are emerging as important yet understudied forms of organization through which cooperativist fishers in Mexico are enacting new forms of collective action and political representation. The purpose of this dissertation is to expand our current understanding of these nested or multi-level cooperative institutions, and their roles as key actors in the governance of fisheries in Mexico. The research adopts a critical institutionalist stance for understanding the roles of cooperativist institutions in the governance of fisheries, responding to critiques of more resource- and rule-centered analyses by focusing on the discourses and politicized dimensions of fisheries governance. The chapters in this dissertation address the following research questions: (1) What kinds of discursive and political practices do cooperativist fishers employ to represent themselves and other actors involved in the governance of fisheries? (2) How do cooperativist fishers assemble around and contribute to understandings of governance problems, and what are the implications for collective action? (3) What do the discourses of cooperativist fishers, examined in historical context and considering other circulating discourses, reveal about contested or politicized aspects of fisheries governance in Mexico?

The dissertation builds on and draws connections between different theoretical traditions for understanding natural resource governance and collective action: institutionalist scholarship on common-pool resources and the commons; human geography, political economy and political ecology; science and technology studies; and discursive or interpretive approaches to policy analysis. The data collection and fieldwork that inform the dissertation were conducted in the context of a collaborative research project, the National Diagnostic of Fishing Organizations (DNOP), which involved one national confederation of fishing cooperatives, two environmental NGOs in Mexico, and researchers from Duke University. The dissertation relies primarily on different forms of qualitative data, including audio recordings and participant observation of national assemblies of the confederation and regional meetings for the DNOP; focus groups and plenary discussions with fishers at regional meetings; key informant interviews with leaders of fishing organizations, NGOs, academics and government officials; and extensive review of legal documents, policies, and academic literature.

Collectively, the chapters in this dissertation demonstrate the importance of examining discourses, and the political practices and subjectivities associated with them, as a way to understand how different actors become positioned in conflicts and debates about the governance of resources such as fisheries. A key theme that emerges from this research is that, through their nested or multi-level organizations, cooperativist fishers engage in political practices of representation that aim to re-center the interests of the cooperativist sector in the wake of more recent policy changes associated with neoliberalism, which have reduced government support for the sector. Cooperativist fishers employ discursive, affective and strategic political practices that are problem-centered – aligning around complex sets of problems or problemáticas. Through these diverse politicized practices, they contest or call into question the dominant approaches for governing fisheries in Mexico, as well as the very nature of the cooperativist sector. Lastly, this dissertation demonstrates the importance of elements such as affect, storytelling, and the legacies of historical policy changes, as factors influencing the forms of collective action that are emerging and being re-negotiated through the work of cooperativist institutions that seek to remain central in the governance of Mexican fisheries.