Search

• In NW Mexico, uneven climate vulnerabilities characterize small-scale fisheries. • A shift in oceanographic regimes provides an opportunity for a natural experiment. • Our results show self-governance mediates fishing strategies and adaptative response. • Trade-offs exist between adaptation and vulnerability across multiple time horizons. As global change accelerates, natural resource-dependent communities must respond and adapt. Small-scale fisheries, essential for coastal livelihoods and food security, are considered among the most vulnerable of these coupled social-ecological systems. While previous studies have examined vulnerability and adaptation in fisheries at the individual, household, and community level, these scales of organization are inconsistent with many of the legal and regulatory frameworks that function in practice to mediate behavior, decision-making, and adaptation. Here, we use cooperative- and privately-owned fishing enterprises in Northwest Mexico as a case study to examine how different forms of marine self-governance experience and respond to climate shocks. Leveraging social-ecological network methods to examine changes in fisheries participation and vulnerability during a recent period of pronounced regional oceanographic change, our analysis suggests that: 1) different forms of SSF self-governance (and the fishing strategies and harvest portfolios with which they are associated) help determine the impacts of and response to environmental change; and 2) that there may be important trade-offs between short-term responses which function to prevent or mitigate lost fishing revenue and long-term changes in climate vulnerability. In particular large fishing cooperatives, predicted to be highly vulnerable on the basis of network theoretic metrics, exceeded expectations (maintaining or increasing resource revenues) while demonstrating a degree of path dependency that may function to increase sensitivity and undermine resilience as climate change progresses. In providing an empirical evaluation of how self-governance arrangements characterized by different group sizes, access regimes and levels of cooperation respond to system perturbation, we aim to advance common pool resource theory while offering targeted guidance for the development of more nuanced and equitable climate adaptation policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A social-ecological network model (panels a and b) allowed to map the diversification strategies of small-scale fisheries actors consisting on switching their target species within one region or between landing regions (i.e., spatial diversification, requiring the spatial displacement or mobility of fisheries actors). We analyzed changes in diversification strategies from 2008 to 2016 in Baja California Sur, Mexico, which included a moderate La Niña event characterized by colder sea surface temperatures (2011) and a strong El Niño characterized by warmer sea surface temperatures (2015). We found that even if species diversification within one region is more prevalent than spatial diversification, inter-anual changes in spatial diversification are, correlated with oceanographic changes. However, the diversification patterns differ between landing regions (e.g., panels c and d) and between species targeted. We investigate these differences in light of the characteristics of species groups and existing literature, and provide hypotheses regarding the environmental and institutional factors that may influence the observed diversification patterns. Overall, our novel social-ecological network model proved useful to understand multi-species diversification patterns across time and space. We shed light into the dynamics and structures of small-scale fisheries' diversification patterns that are increasingly important in the current era of global change. • We use social-ecological networks to analyze diversification strategies over time. • We analyze spatial and species diversification in tandem. • Changes in spatial diversification are correlated with oceanographic changes. • Institutional factors may constrain or enable spatial diversification. • Management needs to account for spatial diversification in a changing climate. Small-scale fisheries' actors increasingly face new challenges, including climate driven shifts in marine resource distribution and productivity. Diversification of target species and fishing locations is a key mechanism to adapt to such changes and maintain fisheries livelihoods. Here we explore environmental and institutional factors mediating how patterns of spatial diversification (i.e., utilization of alternative fishing grounds) and target species diversification change over time. Using small-scale fisheries in Baja California Sur (Mexico) as a case study, we adopt a social-ecological network approach to conduct a spatially explicit analysis of fisheries landings data (2008–2016). This approach quantifies relative patterns of diversification, and when combined with a qualitative analysis of existing literature, enables us to illuminate institutional and environmental factors that may influence diversification strategies. Our results indicate that interannual changes in spatial diversification are correlated with regional oceanographic change, while illustrating the heterogeneity and dynamism of diversification strategies. Rather than acting in isolation, we hypothesize that environmental drivers likely operate in combination with existing fisheries regulations and local socioeconomic context to mediate spatial diversification. We argue that small-scale fisheries policies need to better account such linkages as we move towards an increasingly variable environment. Overall, our results highlight spatial diversification as a dynamic process and constitute an important step towards understanding and managing the complex mechanisms through which environmental changes affect small-scale fisheries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Secure property rights are often seen as a precondition of incentives for long‐term sustainable use by communities dependent on natural resources. Securing formal property rights can be challenging in coastal small‐scale fisheries, which often operate under open access conditions. We argue that insecure, informal rights can offer one pathway for property‐rights regime change, and may also provide greater flexibility for developing sustainable fishing practices compatible with climate change adaptation, among other policy‐relevant outcomes. The process of establishing short‐term but renewable area‐based conservation tools, such as the Fish Refuges of Baja California Sur, Mexico, offers the opportunity to examine how community‐based strategies can generate incentives for conservation despite the lack of secure property rights. Using in‐depth qualitative methods, socioeconomic surveys, and ecological data from 2009 to 2019, we studied the process of engagement among fishers, civil society, and government. We focused on understanding the emerging transition from a scenario of open access and limited withdrawal property rights, toward locals' attaining of insecure defacto management and exclusion property rights and longer‐term visions of resource use and conservation. Altogether, this case illustrates the potential and limitations of Fish Refuges as an area‐based fisheries and conservation tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One strategy for ecological monitoring of protected areas involves data collection by local resource users instead of external scientists. Growing support for such programs comes from their potential to both reduce costs and influence how resource users perceive and support protected areas, but their effects on participants are only beginning to be understood. We contribute to this growing research area through an in-depth study of how participants, their close kin, and their peers perceived the individual and community-wide effects of an ecological monitoring program. We examined the case of fishers' involvement in ecological monitoring of a marine protected area network in Baja California Sur, Mexico, organized since 2012 by the Mexican non-governmental organization Niparajá. Based on in-depth interviews and participant observation in 2016 and 2017, we found that the most salient effect of the program was personal growth. Participants described becoming "more than a fisher" through newly gained civic and environmental awareness, ecological knowledge, and self-confidence in public speaking skills. Respondents also identified health risks from diving and emotional burdens on participants' families. Overall, other resource users in their communities seem to be supportive through reputational benefits of participants. These effects overlap with but seem more extensive than those documented in other citizen science programs. Environmentality provides a suitable explanation of the processes at play, where the act of monitoring is far more than data collection, intertwining participants' fortunes (for better or worse) with the political fate of the protected area network itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Environmental governance is more effective when the scales of ecological processes are well matched with the human institutions charged with managing human-environment interactions. The social-ecological systems (SESs) framework provides guidance on how to assess the social and ecological dimensions that contribute to sustainable resource use and management, but rarely if ever has been operationalized for multiple localities in a spatially explicit, quantitative manner. Here, we use the case of small-scale fisheries in Baja California Sur, Mexico, to identify distinct SES regions and test key aspects of coupled SESs theory. Regions that exhibit greater potential for social-ecological sustainability in one dimension do not necessarily exhibit it in others, highlighting the importance of integrative, coupled system analyses when implementing spatial planning and other ecosystem-based strategies. [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]

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]

The article examines commercial diving and the Callo de Hacha Fishery in Seriland, Mexico. The Seri people people are a group of seafaring hunter-gatherers who were organized in seminomadic bands. The coastal territory are covered with extensive portion of the Sonoran Desert. The type of fishery is a practice at the Canal del Infiernillo, a part of the Seri fishing with a lot of callos.

The Seri people, a self-governed community of small-scale fishermen in the Gulf of California, Mexico, have ownership rights to fishing grounds where they harvest highly valuable commercial species of bivalves. Outsiders are eager to gain access, and the community has devised a set of rules to allow them in. Because Seri government officials keep all the economic benefits generated from granting this access for themselves, community members create alternative entry mechanisms to divert those benefits to themselves. Under Hardin's model of the tragedy of the commons, this situation would eventually lead to the overexploitation of the fishery. The Seri people, however, are able to simultaneously maintain access and use controls for the continuing sustainability of their .fishing grounds. Using insights from common-pool resources theory, I discuss how Seri community characteristics help mediate the conflict between collective action dilemmas and access and use controls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Small-scale fisheries (SSF) contribute substantially to global food security, sustainable marine ecosystems and poverty alleviation. Yet many SSF face problems of overexploitation and poverty calling for novel governance approaches that enhance human-wellbeing, equity and ecological sustainability. External policies and interventions to support such governance transformations, however, need to take their often self-governed nature into account. Common practices based on informal arrangements between different fishery actors can make existing, mal-adapted structures very persistent and hence difficult to overcome. Here we combine multi-method empirical research on SSF in Mexico with agent-based modeling to analyze if and under which conditions interventions can shift ongoing self-organizing dynamics into directions that support the new governance form. We are particularly interested in the effectiveness of two different types of interventions, financial and social, and their performance under variable social and ecological conditions as commonly found in SSF. Our analysis reveals that a combination of financial and social support during extended periods of time is necessary to ensure persistence of new governance forms in face of competition with established forms, as well as environmental and social uncertainty. The findings highlight the importance of understanding the endogenous self-organizing dynamics created by the interplay between social (e.g. the dynamics of trust) and ecological (e.g. resource dynamics) processes in order to devise policies and measures to initiate a shift towards more sustainable pathways. • Combination of financial and social support needed for transforming governance. • Interventions need to be applied over extended periods of time. • Additional actions are needed to build resilience in uncertain world. • Combining empirical research with agent-based modelling allowed studying dynamic complexity. • Reinforcing feedbacks are particularly critical for overcoming lock-ins and accelerating adoption. [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]

The importance of understanding how social-ecological interdependencies deriving from global trade influence sustainability has been argued for decades. Even if substantial progress has been made, a research gap remains regarding how the adaptability of small-scale fish buyers, whose daily operations have implications for the livelihood of more than 100 million people, are affected by networks of trade relationships. Adaptability is here defined as fish buyers´ abilities to adapt using their relationships with others. We elaborate how these capacities relate to the precise patterns in which a fish buyer is entangled with other fish buyers, with the fishers, and with the targeted fish species, by combining a multilevel social-ecological network model with empirical data from a small-scale fishery in Mexico. Further, we also identify types of fish buyers distinguishable by how they operate, and how they are embedded in the trading network. Our results suggest that adaptability differs substantially amongst these types, thus implying that fish buyers' abilities to respond to changes are unevenly distributed. This study demonstrates the need for a more profound understanding of the consequences of the different ways in which fish buyers operate commercially, and how these operations are affected by patterns of social and social-ecological interdependencies. A multi-level network model explicates trade relationships amongst fish buyers and between fish buyers, fishers, and fish resources. We use this model to conceptualize fish buyer's adaptive capacity defined by three dimensions: adaptive capacity in relation to other buyers, in relation to fishers, and in relation to fish resource fluctuations. In combining network measures with qualitative insights, we characterized five types of fish buyers based on their pattern of relationships with other fish buyers, and how they are connected with fishers and with different types of market demand. The results suggest that each type of fish buyer has different capacities to adapt to changes, which can have potential implication for small-scale fisheries sustainability. Unlabelled Image • Trade involves fish exchange embedded in social relationships. • We disentangle patterns of fish trade relationships in a small-scale fishery. • We define five types of fish buyers with three distinct functions. • Fish buyer's types can be associated with different capacities to adapt to changes. • Fish buyer's types may influence fishing patterns and trade differently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.