Biological and ecological mechanisms supporting marine self-governance: The Seri Callo de Hacha Fishery in Mexico
Abstract
My goal was to describe how biological and ecological factors give shape to fishing
practices that can contribute to the successful self-governance of a small-scale fishing
system in the Gulf of California, Mexico. The analysis was based on a comparison of
the main ecological and biological indicators that fishers claim to use to govern
their day-to-day decision making about fishing and data collected in situ. I found
that certain indicators allow fishers to learn about differences and characteristics
of the resource system and its units. Fishers use such information to guide their
day-to-day fishing decisions. More importantly, these decisions appear unable to shape
the reproductive viability of the fishery because no indicators were correlated to
the reproductive cycle of the target species. As a result, the fishing practices constitute
a number of mechanisms that might provide short-term buffering capacity against perturbations
or stress factors that otherwise would threaten the overall sustainability and self-governance
of the system. The particular biological circumstances that shape the harvesting practices
might also act as a precursor of self-governance because they provide fishers with
enough incentives to meet the costs of organizing the necessary rule structure that
underlies a successful self-governance system.
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Show full item recordScholars@Duke
Xavier Basurto
Truman and Nellie Semans/Alex Brown & Sons Associate Professor
I am interested in the fundamental question of how groups (human and non-human) can
find ways to self-organize, cooperate, and engage in successful collective action
for the benefit of the common good. To do this I strive to understand how the institutions
(formal and informal rules and norms) that govern social behavior, interplay with
biophysical variables to shape social-ecological systems. What kind of institutions
are better able to govern complex-adaptive systems? and how can societies (la

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