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Fishing cooperatives (co-ops) and patron-client relationships are the most common cooperative and noncooperative strategies for self-governance for small-scale fisheries around the world. We studied what drives fishers to choose between these two self-governance arrangements in 12 communities in the Gulf of California, Mexico. The communities depend on similar fishing resources, are located in contiguous portions of the coast, fish roughly the same species, have similar socioeconomic characteristics, and sell to similar markets, yet half of the fisheries are organized around co-ops and the other half work through patron-client arrangements. Using participant observation, in-depth interviews of key informants between 1995-2008, and a survey of 55% of the fisheries in the study area, we found that the presence of high transaction costs of commercialization, the desire to acquire fishing licenses, and the existence of traditions of successful collective action among fishing groups within each community strongly influence fishers' choices regarding membership in fishing co-ops. We also examined the implications of our findings for conservation of fishing resources. Given that the emergence of co-ops was associated with high transaction costs of commercialization, we hypothesize that cooperative strategies are more likely than patron-client strategies to emerge in communities in isolated locations. In an era of globalization, in which the rate of development and urbanization will increase in coastal areas, patron-client strategies are likely to become more prevalent among fisheries, but such self-governance strategies are thought to be less conducive to conservation behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are in a period of unprecedented growth in conservation philanthropy. How will this influx of private funding affect conservation agendas? Inspired by a collaborative research co-design process, this paper addresses questions about how foundations influence conservation agendas in the places they work. We draw from a case study of the world's largest philanthropic funder of marine conservation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and their 20 years of investment in marine conservation in Palau and Fiji. Conservation practitioners in both countries universally agreed that the Packard Foundation had a significant and positive influence on the agenda, which they attribute to both how the foundation worked and what they chose to fund. Specifically, our study reveals how the Packard Foundation shaped conservation agendas in Palau and Fiji in partnership with its grantees through a grant-making process characterized by relationship building, collaborative decision making, convening and promoting of collective action, flexibility, and long-term funding. Packard's approach was often identified as unique, and contrasted with numerous other donors, including foundations and other types of donors, who use a more top-down approach. By describing a relative success story in how philanthropic foundations can work with conservation practitioners to co-design a shared conservation agenda, our work provides timely guidance for donors and practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social-ecological resilience is an increasingly central paradigm for understanding sustainable resource management. In this study, we aimed to better understand the effect of environmental variability on the resilience of fishery systems, and the important role that social institutions and biophysical constraints play. To explore these issues, we built a dynamic model of the pen shell fishery of the indigenous Seri people in the Gulf of California, Mexico. This model included the dynamics of the two dominant species in the fishery (Atrina tuberculosa and Pinna rugosa), several institutional rules that the Seri use, and a number of ecological constraints, including key stochastic variables derived from empirical data. We found that modeling with multiple species, rather than the standard one-species model, uncovered more of the resilience that is present in the system. We also found that it is the combination of several social-ecological rules working in conjunction with the endogenous environmental variability that helps ensure the resilience of the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop an analytic framework for the analysis of robustness in social-ecological systems (SESs) over time. We argue that social robustness is affected by the disturbances that communities face and the way they respond to them. Using Ostrom's ontological framework for SESs, we classify the major factors influencing the disturbances and responses faced by five Indiana intentional communities over a 15-year time frame. Our empirical results indicate that operational and collective-choice rules, leadership and entrepreneurship, monitoring and sanctioning, economic values, number of users, and norms/social capital are key variables that need to be at the core of future theoretical work on robustness of self-organized systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]