Learning from Performance of Small-scale Fishery Development Projects

Abstract

In light of the 2015 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, multiple nongovernmental organizations (“NGOs”) and development agencies are seeking to re-evaluate the ways in which they engage with small-scale fisheries (“SSFs”) around the globe. As groups seek to engage with and fund projects in SSFs, it is increasingly necessary to look at what successful outcomes of SSFs management interventions might look like. I sought to explore how and why fisheries development projects delivering external financial or technical support to SSFs might facilitate successful outcomes by looking through past studies from the published scientific literature. Learning how past SSFs projects have evaluated success might provide insight into trends for monitoring projects as well as future direction of project evaluations. Studies looking into these questions have not been done for SSFs. I worked to contribute towards identifying pathways to effectively increase technical and financial support to SSFs at a large spatial scale as a basis for a new global strategy. Specifically, I explored the following research questions: (1) how the literature describes and documents large-scale SSFs development projects (2) how and why large-scale fisheries development projects might facilitate successful outcomes, and (3) how impact of these large-scale fisheries projects is measured in the literature. This project identifies and describes 30 large-scale SSFs development projects delivering research and policy support to a wide geographic spread of countries and geographies.