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To finalize our OctoPINTS research project we conducted a field visit back to Zanzibar to say thank you to those that participated in our research over the years, to validate our findings, and provide a space for discussion around our results and methods. We hosted an open event in Stone Town, where practitioners, state representatives, researchers and students were invited. This report summarizes this open research feedback event.

Small-scale fisheries (SSF) around the world are often organized in patron-client relationships (PC), where fishers deliver fish to a fishbuyer who sells it at regional markets. PCs have recently been criticized as being unequal, exploitative and unsustainable. Many governments have thus developed measures to promote fishing cooperatives. Despite these efforts, PC relationships appear to be increasing globally. The aim of our work is to shed light on why this social organization is very persistent. To this end we combine in depth empirical research on fishbuyers and fishers in an SSF in Mexico with agent-based modeling. This allows us to test hypotheses about the role of actor characteristics, such as their social skills, and the resources, as well as the institutional environment in which these interactions take place, for the establishment and persistence of PC relationships versus cooperatives.

Periodic reef closures for octopus (hence forth Octopus closures) are increasingly being promoted and adopted in the Western Indian Ocean. At the 2019 symposium of the Western Indian Ocean Marine Science Association (WIOMSA) the OctoPINTS project facilitated a special session of participants with experience of octopus closures from Kenya, Mozambique, Madagascar, Tanzania mainland and Zanzibar. The aim of the session was to explore a) how success in Octopus closures was defined, and why successful outcomes are achieved in different scenarios b) explore commonalities and context specific factors across different cases and c) what are the most urgent research and management questions for octopus management in the region. This report provides a summary of the discussions and insights as well as detailed notes and a participant list from the session.

Social-ecological systems (SES) are complex adaptive systems. Social-ecological system phenomena, such as regime shifts, transformations, or traps, emerge from interactions among and between human and nonhuman entities within and across scales. Analyses of SES phenomena thus require approaches that can account for (1) the intertwinedness of social and ecological processes and (2) the ways they jointly give rise to emergent social-ecological patterns, structures, and dynamics that feedback on the entities and processes that generated them. We have developed a framework of linked action situations (AS) as a tool to capture those interactions that are hypothesized to have jointly and dynamically generated a social-ecological phenomenon of interest. The framework extends the concept of an action situation to provide a conceptualization of SES that focusses on social-ecological interactions and their links across levels. The aim of our SE-AS (social-ecological action situations) framework is to support a process of developing hypotheses about configurations of ASs that may explain an emergent social-ecological phenomenon. We suggest six social-ecological ASs along with social and ecological action situations that can commonly be found in natural resource or ecosystem management contexts. We test the ability of the framework to structure an analysis of processes of emergence by applying it to different case studies of regime shifts, traps, and sustainable resource use. The framework goes beyond existing frameworks and approaches, such as the SES framework or causal loop diagrams, by establishing a way of analyzing SES that focuses on the interplay of social-ecological interactions with the emergent outcomes they produce. We conclude by discussing the added value of the framework and discussing the different purposes it can serve: from supporting the development of theories of the emergence of social-ecological phenomena, enhancing transparency of SES understandings to serving as a boundary object for interdisciplinary knowledge integration.

Small-scale fisheries (SSFs) in developing countries are expected to play a significant role in poverty alleviation and enhancing food security in the decades to come. To realize this expectation, a better understanding of their informal self-governance arrangements is critical for developing policies that can improve fishers' livelihoods and lead to sustainable ecosystem stewardship. The goal of this paper is to develop a more nuanced understanding of micro-level factors-such as fishers' characteristics and behavior-to explain observed differences in self-governance arrangements in Northwest Mexico. We focus on two ubiquitous forms of self-governance: hierarchical non-cooperative arrangements between fishers and fishbuyers, such as patron-client relationships (PCs), versus more cooperative arrangements amongst fishers, such as fishing cooperatives (co-ops). We developed an agent-based model of an archetypical SSF that captures key hypotheses from in-depth fieldwork in Northwest Mexico of fishers' day-to-day fishing and trading. Results from our model indicate that high diversity in fishers' reliability, and low initial trust between co-op members, makes co-ops' establishment difficult. PCs cope better with this kind of diversity because, in contrast to co-ops, they have more flexibility in choosing whom to work with. However, once co-ops establish, they cope better with seasonal variability in fish abundance and provide long-term security for the fishers. We argue that existing levels of trust and diversity among fishers matter for different self-governance arrangements to establish and persist, and should therefore be taken into account when developing better, targeted policies for improved SSFs governance.