Wintergalen, Edward

Cooperative organizations are internationally promoted as a means of achieving conservation and governance objectives in small-scale fisheries (SSFs), but global trends in coastal development and population growth may be disincentivizing fishers from joining or remaining in cooperatives. This idea has potentially important implications for SSF governance and conservation but has not been tested on a national scale. To fill this gap, we use data from Mexico to establish the relationship between fishing cooperatives’ rate of dissolution and their proximity to urban areas. Results show substantial evidence of a negative association between the odds that a cooperative is defunct and its travel time to the nearest urban center. Specifically, a cooperative that is less than half an hour from an urban center is about twice as likely to go defunct compared to a similar cooperative that is farther away. This result suggests that challenges such as lower transaction costs, ecosystem degradation, and the availability of alternative livelihood opportunities may be decreasing the viability of SSF cooperatives in or near urban areas. Policymakers, development practitioners, and conservation organizations that rely upon long-term collaboration with fishing cooperatives in Mexico and beyond should be aware of the possibility that the urban context is more conducive to alternative organizational models, such as patron-client arrangements, that may be less conducive to sustainable resource use and participatory governance.

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.