Addressing the complex challenges faced by commons and their users in an equitable and sustainable manner requires the co-production of governance arrangements from a broad range of actors. As such, this approach necessitates leveraging diverse experiences and expertise. One example of such transdisciplinary collaboration and co-production of knowledge is the 10 years-long National Plan for the Strengthening of Fishing Organizations in Mexico (PNFOP), which brought together representatives from the fishing sector, non-governmental organizations, and academia. This partnership has aimed to understand the principal problems facing fishers, engage in dialogue with them, and then co-design and support the strengthening of their small-scale fishing organizations. This was done through a series of training sessions, workshops, and assessments with a goal of empowering them to achieve their collective goals, such as income stability, food security, and sustainable resource use. Initiated in 2015 with modest objectives, this participatory action research is now in its fourth phase. This process underscores the importance of trust, long-term vision, leadership, and, most importantly, collaborative effort. The selected presentations will highlight the evolution of roles and visions within this project from the perspectives of each actor group, outline the diverse methodological approaches employed, discuss some of the major findings and their broader implications within and beyond the sector from the standpoint of all involved actors, and summarize different changes that are possible in fishing organizations in a short time period.
We have estimated that SSF provide at least 40% (37.3 million tonnes) of global fisheries catches and 2.3 billion people with, on average, 20% of their dietary intake across 6 key micronutrients essential for human health. Globally, the livelihood of one in every twelve people, nearly half of them women, depends at least partially on small-scale fishing, altogether generating 44% (USD 77.2 billion) of total fisheries landed economic value. Maintaining and increasing these multi-dimensional SSF contributions to sustainable development requires targeted and effective actions, especially increasing engagement of fisherfolk in shared management and governance. Without management and governance focused on SSF’s multi-dimensional contributions, the marginalization of millions of fishers and fishworkers will worsen. In this presentation we report on the above findings and analyze emerging patterns of self-governance strategies small-scale fishers from around the world have developed in an attempt to capture the multi-dimensional benefits produced by their fishing activities. We review cases form around the world to inform what might be the blind spots and promising pathways for small-scale producers to best confront looming governance and sustainability challenges in the context of food security, poverty alleviation, inequality, and climate change.
We provide the first global assessment of the status of preferential access areas (PAAs), a relatively understudied policy tool to govern small-scale fisheries. We find 44 countries, most of them of low or low-middle income, have established a total of 63 PAAs encompassing 3% of continental shelf area worldwide. The analysis of an ad-hoc subsample of twelve countries in three continents for which data were available (2016-2017) revealed that PAAs supported greater amounts of small-scale fisheries marine catch volume, landed value, fishing for self-consumption, and more nutritious species than marine areas outside PAAs. This preliminary assessment suggests that if appropriately enforced through shared governance with fishers and responsible fishing practices, relatively small areas of the ocean could provide important nutrition security, economic, and employment benefits to millions of people living in coastal areas. We offer an agenda for future research and policy action based on our findings.
The diverse characteristics and contexts of small-scale producers underpin their multidimensional contributions to sustainable development, including food provision, resilience, poverty alleviation, and cultural heritage preservation. However, their diversity is often oversimplified, limiting their impact on global development and hindering effective food systems transformation. We use the case of small-scale fisheries, a diverse subsector capable of feeding one in four people globally, to challenge the dominant narrative that small-scale producers are too complex and context specific to be effectively categorised. Our analysis of over a thousand small-scale fisheries representing 66% of global marine small-scale fisheries using a model-based clustering approach, found five global archetypes of small-scale fisheries. Each archetype was characterised by different operational, socioeconomic, technological, and post-harvest attributes. Our findings start to unlock small-scale fisheries’ potential to contribute meaningfully to food systems transformation. Our approach is low-cost, simple to apply and well-suited for decision-making processes in data-limited contexts, particularly in the Global South. The case of small-scale fisheries is fully transferable to small-scale producers across other food sectors, paving the way for more precise policy-making and enabling their full contributions to sustainable development potentially benefiting millions of people globally.
Collaboration is a way of generating knowledge to contribute to improving the management of common resources. Based on this idea, since 2022 the representatives of the fishing sector, civil society and academia, implemented the first pilot of the National Program for Strengthening Fisheries Organizations in Mexico in which 6 cooperatives and 3 fishing federations were engaged in a year-long capacity building exercises through training, work plans, advice and evaluations. We wanted to know if our program was capable of generating changes in fishing organizations. In this presentation we will talk about the different ways we used to evaluate changes in cooperatives before, during and after the program. To evaluate the cooperatives, we applied surveys to more than 500 partners and 36 focus groups. We also documented the efforts of the cooperatives during their participation, conducted interviews with leaders of the organizations and participant observation. The results of the evaluations made it possible to identify changes in the functionality of the participating cooperatives in the short-term and improve the evaluation instruments in a next stage. However, the observations made during the field strengthening process were very important to adjust the implementation of the program at the time, capture other impacts at the personal and community level, as well as improve the criteria for selecting cooperatives in the future. Currently, we are working on medium and long-term monitoring of the cooperatives and the differentiation of the changes in the organizations generated by the program, while taking into consideration challenges posed by the time and costs associated with the evaluations.
Successful collective action is crucial for the maintenance and sustainability of our environment and the common-pool resources that underpin it. In fisheries, like in forestry, and water use, successful collective action means interaction, negotiation, and cooperation among stakeholders often with very diverse goals and agendas. How are stakeholders with diverse worldviews able to find common ground? Once they do, if they do, what do those agreements look like? What are the implications for their original agendas and goals? In this presentation, myself an academic along with my colleague, the President of the Mexican Confederation of Fishing Cooperatives, we reflect to provide our answer to those questions in the context of the almost decade long collaboration we have built around the study of the strengths and weaknesses of fishing cooperatives in our country. We reflect how our research methodology has been influenced by the partnership with the fishing sector, what kinds of biases and strengths this has brought. Similarly we reflect on the challenges and opportunities the partnership with academics has brought to the sector’s leadership. In this way we consider how the roles and visions we initially had for each other have changed (or not) over time. We close by discussing what are the main lessons and implications we take from this experience in terms of (a) prospects for future efforts to engage in co-production of knowledge between academia and small-scale producers of food; (b) future policy-making for the sector; (c) and broader policy implications beyond the fishing sector.
Small-scale fishing (SSF) cooperatives are more conducive to sustainable resource use, co-governance, and the equitable distribution of economic benefits compared to alternative forms of SSF self-organization. To maintain a functioning cooperative and produce these benefits, cooperative leaders and members must have high levels of administrative capacity and a mutual commitment to cooperative values. However, it remains unclear how and whether cooperatives and governments can promote these qualities to maximize the benefits of cooperative co-governance. To fill this gap, between 2022 and 2023, the National Plan for the Strengthening of Fishing Organizations in Mexico (PNFOP) implemented a pilot program in which six cooperatives in three states (two from Baja California Sur, two from Chiapas, and two from Yucatan) co-designed and participated in a series of training sessions designed to empower them to achieve their collective goals. Using before-after survey data collected from the members of the six participant cooperatives and three control cooperatives, we create several regression models to answer two questions in two stages: i) Is participation in the PNFOP associated with an improvement in cooperative functionality? ii) Among cooperatives who participated, what cooperative- and local-level conditions influence the results of the program? Preliminary results for the first stage analysis show that the participant cooperatives generally experienced greater improvement in functionality compared to the control cooperatives. Results for the second stage suggest that cooperatives’ change in functionality is associated with cooperatives’ region, positively associated with cooperatives’ training session attendance rate, and negatively associated with the cooperative’s initial functionality score. Using these results, we argue that co-designed cooperative strengthening programs have the potential to improve cooperative functionality and, therefore, facilitate SSF conservation, governance, and well-being objectives. We also emphasize that the near-complete participation of cooperatives’ members is necessary to achieve these results.
Small-scale fisheries are vital for coastal communities, and research has been done on how collective action in fishing cooperatives enhances social-ecological outcomes. However, there is a gap in understanding diverse aspects of governance and collaboration in the Mexican mid-Pacific coastal region, one of the least studied areas.
This research examines the institutional organization of fishing cooperatives on the southern coast of Jalisco, identifying weaknesses and proposing solutions to strengthen them. Using a mixed-methods approach, we conducted 12 in-depth interviews to evaluate 20 aspects of the functionality of eight fishing cooperatives, grouped into six categories: 1) internal regulations and administration, 2) infrastructure, 3) benefits and social responsibilities, 4) economy and commercialization, 5) networking, and 6) transparency and participation.
An opportunity arose to work with the Chamela cooperative to conduct a productive project. Based on a participatory action research approach, it has been possible to examine collective action processes and the collaborative efforts among different stakeholders (NGOs, researchers, entrepreneurs, and governmental agencies) involved in the management of fisheries resources. Through participant observation and focus groups, fishers’ perspectives regarding challenges, their causes, and possible actions to mitigate them were documented.
Results show that internal regulations, administration, transparency, and trust, are crucial for fishing organizations, which acknowledge the need to improve cooperativism. Diverse formal and informal rules exist due to the absence of territorial rights, with some restrictions on fishing gear and areas to respect between cooperatives. The decline in catches attributable to the 2023 El Niño prompted fishers to organize. Our preliminary conclusions are that our work clarified individual desires among participants, facilitating collective action. Also, exploring institutional design and collective action issues requires more than conventional research methods. Additionally, this experience fosters processes that may strengthen cooperation and promote the responsible use of marine resources.
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