Browsing by Subject "small-scale fisheries"

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.

Increasingly the challenges of environmental governance are understood as global in nature and scope. Within fisheries, industrial fisheries have long been the global priority in fisheries science, policy instruments, and management techniques. Meanwhile, small-scale fisheries (SSF) have historically been relegated to the margins, framed as local, place-based, static practices from the past rather than global priorities. This dissertation examines the conditions and consequences of transformation in SSF governance, as SSF are becoming a global concern. The passage of a recent internationally negotiated policy for the small-scale sector signifies this monumental shift underway in global fisheries governance priorities: The Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries in the Context of Food Security and Poverty Eradication (SSF Guidelines).By ‘following the policy,’ this research examines the dynamics of policy mobility (e.g., who and what came together to make and implement this policy) across multiple sites and scales of policymaking and implementation as the SSF guidelines are mobilized at global, regional, and national levels. The movement to transform fisheries governance is examined against past patterns in fisheries science and policy, including through analysis of a large-N dataset. The mixed methods used provide needed insights into how different actors (e.g., scientists, policymakers, civil society organizations) have grappled with the questions “governance of what, by whom, to what ends” in SSF through time. While the passage of the SSF Guidelines in 2014 was considered a landmark moment for the SSF sector, attention has now shifted to what they will become; whether and how this policy will ‘scale down’ and to what effects. Studying policy implementation is critical to understanding how transformative change happens in fisheries governance and environmental governance more broadly. Developed with ongoing input from civil society organizations, the SSF Guidelines are the first global policy designed explicitly for SSF. Endorsing gender equality, decent work, and human rights as necessary tenets of sustainability, this policy’s core principles stand in stark contrast to the status quo in fisheries governance. But what these principles will become is uncertain because policy implementation was left intentionally open-ended in the text of the SSF Guidelines which were written without pre-determined implementation targets or definitions of success. This dissertation addresses the central question: How is such an unconventional and unlikely policy mobilized in practice, and how are the ideas within translated in place? To this end, this research engages with the literature on global environmental governance, theories of scale from human geography and common-pool resource scholarship, and the emergent field of critical policy studies, extending these insights to the dynamics SSF governance, an understudied common-pool resource system undergoing transformation here and now. Amidst the wider movement to transform fisheries governance to be more equitable, this research focuses on the principle of gender equality within the SSF Guidelines. Emphasis is placed on how the principle of gender equality came to be part of a global policy instrument in the first place, and later, articulated as the focus of national policy implementation. While this is a multi-sited and multi-scaled story, the dynamics of national-level implementation are followed in the context of Tanzania, one country working to implement this policy in their vast inland and marine fisheries with a chosen focus on gender. Tracing the multi-stakeholder process of developing a national ‘roadmap’ to implement the SSF Guidelines there, this dissertation reveals how the goal of gender equality was translated into specific strategies determined in place, including through a collaborative effort to ‘map’ existing women’s fishing organizations and networks among them. Conclusions demonstrate that flexibility intentionally built into the design of global policies can create room for new understandings of what small-scale fisheries are, how they should be governed, and what a sustainable and desirable future for fisheries looks like—making space to imagine and enact alternatives that are more just and inclusive. Following the indeterminate arc of policy mobility then is critical to determining who steps into the space created by policy change. In the story of creating and implementing the SSF Guidelines, civil society organizations played an outsized role in affecting multi-scalar policy transformation.

The need for effective multi-level governance arrangements is becoming increasingly apparent because of the high functional interdependencies between biophysical and socioeconomic factors in the realm of natural resource governance. Such arrangements provide a basis for the exchange, discussion, and deliberation of information, knowledge, and data across diverse user groups and entities. Multi-level governance is operationalized by using a microinstitutional analysis that links decision-making arenas across three distinct levels: operational, collective-choice, and constitutional. Within this context, I argue that the effectiveness and success of actors' participatory processes across these three levels depend on the amount of social capital among actors within the governance system. I assessed the concept of social capital using two different models: (1) a structural approach focused on resources embedded within an individual's network, and (2) a combined structural-cultural approach that incorporates various aspects of group membership with relations of trust, rules, and norms. To explore the effects of social capital on participatory processes related to the implementation and management of natural resources, I analyzed different small-scale fisheries governance regimes from the Gulf of California, Mexico. I collected data using surveys (n=371), interviews (n=82), and participant observation techniques conducted among the residents of four small-scale fishing communities that live adjacent to marine protected areas along the Baja California, Mexico, peninsula. Data analysis included both quantitative (logit regression model), and qualitative (narrative analysis) approaches. Overall, my results suggest that both social capital models reveal the multidimensional nature of social capital where none of its individual types form a consistent and statistically significant relationship with the six outcomes that I measured. However, these types are related in different ways to fishers engagement in participatory processess across the three levels. The extent of fishers' engagement in participatory processess across different levels was not high. Qualitative analysis revealed that participatory processes related to fisheries conservation and management, although present do not reach their full potential and are stymied by a historical context and a lack of general participatory culture.

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.

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.