Ruiz Gala, Bibiana

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.