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Communities throughout the globe are increasingly being given the responsibility of resource management, making it necessary to understand the factors that lead to success in community-based management (CBM). Here, we assessed whether and how institutional design principles affect the ecological outcomes of CBM schemes for Arapaima sp., an important common-pool fishery resource of the Amazon Basin. We quantified the degree of presence of Ostrom's (Science 325:419-422, 1990) institutional design principles in 83 communities using a systematic survey, and quantitatively linked the design principles to a measure of ecological outcome (arapaima density) in a subset of 39 communities to assess their influence. To understand regional patterns of institutional capacity for CBM, we evaluated the degree of presence of each principle in all 83 communities. The principle scores were positively related to arapaima density in the 39 CBM schemes, explaining about half of the variation. Design principles related to defined boundaries and graduated sanctions exerted the strongest influence on the capacity of CBM to increase arapaima density. The degree to which most principles were present in all 83 communities was generally low, however, with the two most influential principles (defined boundaries and graduated sanctions) being the least present of all. Although the roles of the other principles (management rules, conflict resolution, collective action, and monitoring systems) are probably important, our results indicate that efforts aimed at strengthening the presence of defined boundaries and graduated sanctions in communities hold promise to improve the effectiveness of arapaima CBM regionally., (© 2021. Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.)

The international development community is off-track from meeting targets for alleviating global malnutrition. Meanwhile, there is growing consensus across scientific disciplines that fish plays a crucial role in food and nutrition security. However, this 'fish as food' perspective has yet to translate into policy and development funding priorities. We argue that the traditional framing of fish as a natural resource emphasizes economic development and biodiversity conservation objectives, whereas situating fish within a food systems perspective can lead to innovative policies and investments that promote nutrition-sensitive and socially equitable capture fisheries and aquaculture. This paper highlights four pillars of research needs and policy directions toward this end. Ultimately, recognizing and working to enhance the role of fish in alleviating hunger and malnutrition can provide an additional long-term development incentive, beyond revenue generation and biodiversity conservation, for governments, international development organizations, and society more broadly to invest in the sustainability of capture fisheries and aquaculture.

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.

Community-based management and the establishment of marine reserves have been advocated worldwide as means to overcome overexploitation of fisheries. Yet, researchers and managers are divided regarding the effectiveness of these measures. The "tragedy of the commons" model is often accepted as a universal paradigm, which assumes that unless managed by the State or privatized, common-pool resources are inevitably overexploited due to conflicts between the self-interest of individuals and the goals of a group as a whole. Under this paradigm, the emergence and maintenance of effective community-based efforts that include cooperative risky decisions as the establishment of marine reserves could not occur. In this paper, we question these assumptions and show that outcomes of commons dilemmas can be complex and scale-dependent. We studied the evolution and effectiveness of a community-based management effort to establish, monitor, and enforce a marine reserve network in the Gulf of California, Mexico. Our findings build on social and ecological research before (1997-2001), during (2002) and after (2003-2004) the establishment of marine reserves, which included participant observation in >100 fishing trips and meetings, interviews, as well as fishery dependent and independent monitoring. We found that locally crafted and enforced harvesting rules led to a rapid increase in resource abundance. Nevertheless, news about this increase spread quickly at a regional scale, resulting in poaching from outsiders and a subsequent rapid cascading effect on fishing resources and locally-designed rule compliance. We show that cooperation for management of common-pool fisheries, in which marine reserves form a core component of the system, can emerge, evolve rapidly, and be effective at a local scale even in recently organized fisheries. Stakeholder participation in monitoring, where there is a rapid feedback of the systems response, can play a key role in reinforcing cooperation. However, without cross-scale linkages with higher levels of governance, increase of local fishery stocks may attract outsiders who, if not restricted, will overharvest and threaten local governance. Fishers and fishing communities require incentives to maintain their management efforts. Rewarding local effective management with formal cross-scale governance recognition and support can generate these incentives.

In the coming decades, accelerating processes of climate change are expected to impact the world's fisheries. These changes will likely exacerbate ongoing challenges in the governance of small-scale fisheries, which play a significant role in supporting livelihoods and food security throughout the world. Among fishers in Mexico, the perceived impacts of climate change on coastal fisheries are increasingly salient. The purpose of this paper is to examine how the realities of climate change and other socio-environmental phenomena are discursively co-produced by fishers and government actors in a distinct type of political arena: the general assemblies of federated fishing cooperatives. Fishing cooperatives in Mexico organize into regional-level federations, which in turn form national-level confederations. Confederations are therefore multi-level, nested organizations for collective action and political representation. Here, we examine the interactions between fishers and federal government officials in the 2016 general assembly of one confederation, which represents 25 federations with 338 cooperatives. The general assembly of the confederation serves as a political space for open democratic participation among members and, in this case, discussions between fishers and government representatives. The discourses employed by fishers and government actors reveal tensions about the role of the state, the purpose of scientific knowledge in resource management, and the nature of the cooperative small-scale fishing sector. Insights from this case are used to advance discussions about the value of examining discursive practices to gain insights about fisheries policy, through a critical discussion of the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework. We theorize discursive practices as part of politicized performances that coalitions of actors use to express policy preferences and weave together governance narratives, which are useful for understanding positions and broader debates at the national level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary The expansion of global seafood trade creates opportunities as well as risks for small-scale fisheries (SSFs) livelihoods. Markets provide economic opportunity, but without effective governance, high demand can drive resource degradation. In the context of small-scale sea cucumber fisheries in Yucatán, Mexico, this study documents local governance responses to new markets and identifies factors driving those responses. We conducted a comparative case study of two SSF communities, collecting participant observation and interview data during 16 months of fieldwork. Our study found that local rules-in-use did not match government regulations and that the emergence of local rules was shaped by relations of production in each study site. Specifically, patron–client relationships promoted an open access regime that expanded local fishing fleets while fishing cooperatives attempted to restrict access to local fishing grounds through collective action and multi-level linkages with government. We propose that the different material incentives arising from the way that patron–client relationships and cooperatives organize labor, capital, and profits help explain these divergent governance responses. We hypothesize that this finding is generalizable beyond the study context, especially given that patron–client relationships and cooperatives are common throughout the world’s SSFs. This finding builds on previous research that indicates local institutions can mediate the effects of market pressures, showing that the emergence of local rules depends on how resource users are organized not just in relation to resource governance but vis-à-vis the markets themselves. Therefore, effective policies for SSFs facing market pressures require a greater emphasis on regulating local-level trade and governing the commercial aspects of fishing livelihoods. These lessons are relevant to the estimated 540 million individuals whose livelihoods SSFs support who may increasingly engage in the global seafood trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] Develop knowledge classificatory system using the social–ecological system framework. [•] Propose suite of key variables relevant for benthic fisheries social–ecological systems studies. [•] Intent is to aid knowledge accumulation among benthic fisheries researchers. [•] Illustrate approach through two studies of benthic fisheries in Mexico and Chile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] This special issue examines successes and failures in small-scale fisheries. [•] Highlights common conditions that could be causing problems or creating benefits. [•] To generate cumulative lessons, each article uses a common diagnostic framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Addressing global fisheries overexploitation requires better understanding of how small-scale fishing communities in developing countries limit access to fishing grounds. We analyze the performance of a system based on individual licenses and a common property-rights regime in their ability to generate incentives for self-governance and conservation of fishery resources. Using a qualitative before-after-control-impact approach, we compare two neighbouring fishing communities in the Gulf of California, Mexico. Both were initially governed by the same permit system, are situated in the same ecosystem, use similar harvesting technology, and have overharvested similar species. One community changed to a common property-right regime, enabling the emergence of access controls and avoiding overexploitation of benthic resources, while the other community, still relies on the permit system. We discuss the roles played by power, institutions, socio-historic, and biophysical factors to develop access controls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: There are considerable efforts by governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and academia to integrate marine conservation initiatives and customary practices, such as taboos that limit resource use. However, these efforts are often pursued without a fundamental understanding of customary institutions. This paper examines the operational rules in use and the presence of institutional design principles in long-enduring and dynamic customary fisheries management institutions in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, and Mexico. Rather than a “blue print” for devising long-enduring institutions, this study relies on the design principles as a starting point to organize an inquiry into the institutional diversity found in customary governance regimes. Three important trends emerged from this comparative analysis: (1) despite it being notoriously difficult to define boundaries around marine resources, almost 3/4 of the cases in this study had clearly defined boundaries and membership; (2) all of the customary institutions were able to make and change rules, indicating a critical degree of flexibility and autonomy that may be necessary for adaptive management; (3) the customary institutions examined generally lacked key interactions with organizations operating at larger scales, suggesting that they may lack the institutional embeddedness required to confront some common pool resources (CPR) challenges from the broader socioeconomic, institutional and political settings in which they are embedded. Future research will be necessary to better understand how specific institutional designs are related to social and ecological outcomes in commons property institutions. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are often implemented to conserve or restore species, fisheries, habitats, ecosystems, and ecological functions and services; buffer against the ecological effects of climate change; and alleviate poverty in coastal communities. Scientific research provides valuable insights into the social and ecological impacts of MPAs, as well as the factors that shape these impacts, providing useful guidance or 'rules of thumb' for science-based MPA policy. Both ecological and social factors foster effective MPAs, including substantial coverage of representative habitats and oceanographic conditions; diverse size and spacing; protection of habitat bottlenecks; participatory decision-making arrangements; bounded and contextually appropriate resource use rights; active and accountable monitoring and enforcement systems; and accessible conflict resolution mechanisms. For MPAs to realize their full potential as a tool for ocean governance, further advances in policy-relevant MPA science are required. These research frontiers include MPA impacts on nontarget and wide-ranging species and habitats; impacts beyond MPA boundaries, on ecosystem services, and on resource-dependent human populations, as well as potential scale mismatches of ecosystem service flows. Explicitly treating MPAs as 'policy experiments' and employing the tools of impact evaluation holds particular promise as a way for policy-relevant science to inform and advance science-based MPA policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this paper is to improve our understanding of the role of institutional arrangements and ecological factors that facilitate the emergence and sustainability of successful collective action in small-scale fishing social–ecological systems. Using a modified logistic growth function, we simulate how ecological factors (i.e. carrying capacity) affect small-scale fishing communities with varying degrees of institutional development (i.e. timeliness to adopt new institutions and the degree to which harvesting effort is reduced), in their ability to avoid overexploitation. Our results show that strong and timely institutions are necessary but not sufficient to maintain sustainable harvests over time. The sooner communities adopt institutions, and the stronger the institutions they adopt, the more likely they are to sustain the resource stock. Exactly how timely the institutions must be adopted, and by what amount harvesting effort must be diminished, depends on the ecological carrying capacity of the species at the particular location. Small differences in the carrying capacity between fishing sites, even under scenarios of similar institutional development, greatly affects the likelihood of effective collective action. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

[Display omitted] • The World Bank is the single largest funder of marine small-scale fisheries. • SSF have received 47% of total funding to marine fisheries by the Bank. • Overtime analysis identified three distinct eras of support with current increase. • Development paradigms shifted from single economic to multi-dimensional goals. • Individuals, institutional drivers, and social movements explain shifts at the Bank. Small-scale fisheries are becoming a global social and environmental concern. The contribution of marine small-scale fisheries to global food security and coastal livelihoods, coupled with the significant challenges they face, has attracted increasing attention and aid from environmental organizations, philanthropies, and multilateral agencies over recent decades. Our study attends to the understudied role of the World Bank, the largest individual funder shaping present and future sustainability of coastal marine regions, as a key actor shaping global environmental governance paradigms. We asked how funding to the sector has changed over the last 50 years and why, outlining distinct patterns in the flow of small-scale fisheries aid and the underlying intervention models. We contextualize our quantitative analysis of aid patterns over time with qualitative interview data with bank staff, identifying underlying paradigm shifts driven by internal and external factors. More than $2.48 billion was allocated by the World Bank to marine fisheries over the last 50 years, approximately 47% (~$1.17 billion) of which was targeted to marine small-scale fisheries. Three distinct funding periods are identified: rising support to SSF from the 1970s to mid-1980s; a sharp decline in funding in the mid-to-late 1980s and low levels of funding throughout the 1990s; and a steady return to funding SSF in the mid-2000s up to the present. Over time, Bank-funded interventions shifted from pure economic development in the earlier era, to an emphasis on governance and multi-dimensional environmental goals in the recent period. To understand why, we used key-informant interviews to unpack major internal drivers: internal staff changes and presence of key individuals, the decentralization and recentralization of decision-making, and the organization's shifting emphasis from traditional economic growth to multi-dimensional objectives of poverty reduction, among others. External drivers behind funding and paradigm shifts included pressure from the environmental movement, the rise of sustainable development discourses, key global environmental summits in the 1990s, and rising levels of interest in the fisheries sector by the governments of both donor and recipient countries. Processes of 'paradigm shifts' were not swift or singular, rather they were affected by multiple, convergent factors over time. Our findings contribute to the literature on multi-lateral institutions as key actors in environmental governance shaping global development thinking, illustrating the arc of the last half-century of fisheries aid at the Bank while highlighting present dilemmas and future challenges that actors interested in working towards sustainable marine small-scale fisheries face. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decentralization of fisheries management in Mexico has created overlapping state agencies without clearly defined responsibilities. This has generated a management dilemma for national fisheries enforcement, due to ambiguity in implementation and legislation among agencies. Through a case study in the Sian Ka'an Biosphere Reserve, in the Yucatan Peninsula, we explore how local actors have addressed problems resulting from the implementation of these decentralized policies. We focus on local Community Surveillance Committees to understand how cooperation occurs at the local level to enforce fisheries regulations. Through a systematic review of fisheries policies in Mexico, we describe the political context to understand the implications of decentralization. The first author conducted ethnographic fieldwork from 2013 to 2017 in three fishing communities and attended meetings with actors involved in local fisheries management. As part of fieldwork, 42 in-depth interviews with fishers and representatives from state agencies were conducted. Using a polycentric approach, we look beyond the performance of individual fishing cooperatives to focus on the relationships among governance actors. We found factors strengthening the Sian Ka'an surveillance system are local actors' capacity to create rules, their relative autonomy from the government, and the existence of more than one decision-making center. We highlight that ambiguity in the implementation of decentralization also enabled local actors to be innovative and fill gaps in the national fisheries policies enforcement system, through diverse configurations of institutional arrangements. In this case study, those arrangements are the result of a constant process of social innovation and improvement in the fishery's organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Fishermen use lies and ruse to bond, complicating notions of trust in CBNRM and favoring critical theories of social capital. • Joking deceptions help men draw social boundaries and maintain harmony amidst competition for natural resources. • Analysis of gendered social capital and masculinity reveals norms that shape resistance to externally-driven conservation. • Social capital accrual and networks of trust can vary with differing resource pools, even among the same group of users. This paper relates how fishermen in San Evaristo on Mexico's Baja peninsula employ fabrications to strengthen bonds of trust and navigate the complexities of common pool resource extraction. We argue this trickery complicates notions of social capital in community-based natural resource management, which emphasize communitarianism in the form of trust. Trust, defined as a mutual dependability often rooted in honesty, reliable information, or shared expectations, has long been recognized as essential to common pool resource management. Despite this, research that takes a critical approach to social capital places attention on the activities that foster social networks and their norms by arguing that social capital is a process. A critical approach illuminates San Evaristeño practices of lying and joking across social settings and contextualizes these practices within cultural values of harmony. As San Evaristeños assert somewhat paradoxically, for them "lies build trust." Importantly, a critical approach to this case study forces consideration of gender, an overlooked topic in social capital research. San Evaristeña women are excluded from the verbal jousting through which men maintain ties supporting their primacy in fishery management. Both men's joke-telling and San Evaristeños' aversion to conflict have implications for conservation outcomes. As a result, we use these findings to help explain local resistance to outsiders and external management strategies including land trusts, fishing cooperatives, and marine protected areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human-driven changes to aquatic environments threaten small-scale fisheries (SSFs). Ensuring a livable future for SSFs in the Anthropocene requires incorporating ecological knowledge of these diverse multi-species systems beyond the long-standing reliance on populations, a management paradigm adopted from industrial fisheries. Assessing the state of ecological knowledge on SSFs is timely as we enter the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science and Sustainable Development and with the upcoming International Year of Artisanal Fisheries and Aquaculture. Synthesizing research effort can help identify existing knowledge gaps and relatively well-researched 'bright spots' that can inform strategies to achieve global sustainability commitments. Yet trends in ecological research of SSFs are not well understood compared to better-studied industrial fisheries. To address this void, we conducted a synthetic review of SSF publications in ecology journals (n = 302), synthesizing trends in research subjects and methodologies over time. Wide geographic and habitat disparities in the coverage of publications are identified, with marine fisheries in Latin American receiving the greatest coverage while inland and Asian fisheries are understudied relative to the global distribution of SSFs. Bony fish and invertebrates received substantial coverage compared to endangered cartilaginous fishes. Studies have increasingly focused on human dimensions and ecosystem ecology compared to earlier emphasis on population ecology. Methodologically, studies rarely incorporate experiments despite their efficacy in testing interventions. To achieve a 'wider view' of fisheries that is reflective of the needs of SSFs in the Anthropocene, future ecological studies should expand their geographic, taxonomic, and methodological breadth to better assess understudied SSF interactions. • We reviewed all peer-reviewed publications on small-scale fisheries (SSFs) in ecology journals (n =303) and found this literature is young and rapidly expanding, primarily in interdisciplinary journals rather than top-ranked ecology journals. • Well-researched bright spots include the ecology of marine SSFs in Latin America, in coral reef and riverine habitats, and those targeting bony fish and invertebrates. • Existing knowledge gaps represent future opportunities for ecologists to improve research coverage of inland fisheries, cartilaginous fishes, and studies of SSFs in Asia. • Very few studies have experimentally assessed how interventions affect desired ecological outcomes. Future experimental studies are a means for ecologists to aid in the assessment and design of effective, evidence-based interventions for sustainable SSFs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]