Context matters: Looking at role in fishery sustainability could serve as a foundation to improve fisheries worldwide

Governance arrangements that fit social-ecological context help support fishery sustainability.

University of Rhode Island marine affairs professor Mateja Nenadović is the lead author on a new paper in Fish and Fisheries, looking at the management of natural resources via local governance arrangements. Such arrangements range from the collective, such as cooperatives and associations, to the individualistic, such as patrons and owner-operators.

Mateja Nenadović, who teaches world fishing at URI, is looking at governance models for small-scale fisheries, which provide 90% of total fisheries employment world-wide.

Nenadović and colleagues are researching how these arrangements influence marine resource use and associated outcomes. They theorized that sustainable resource use is not associated with a specific governance arrangement, but instead that every type of arrangement has a certain set of conditions under which sustainability is feasible.

His team investigated this hypothesis by studying coastal marine fisheries in Mexico, focusing on the Baja California Sur region between the Gulf of California and the Pacific Ocean. This is one of the most productive marine ecosystems in the world and important for both people and marine biodiversity. Nenadović has been working with fishers in the region for the past 15 years.

Now, his group’s findings have identified which governance arrangements are best suited to particular contexts. Their results provide the initial building blocks for developing a theory of governance fit, instead of “one size fits all” prescriptions for marine management. Such insights will be relevant to small-scale fisheries globally. These fisheries are a critical provider of global food security, biodiversity conservation and poverty alleviation worldwide.

Small-scale fisheries, according to recent studies, produce approximately 40% of the world’s global catch.

Nenadović says their findings suggest that there is no single best governance agreement to achieve sustainable resource use. Instead, they found that each of the two dominant governance arrangements evaluated — cooperative and patron — were both associated with sustainable resource use depending on social and environmental conditions.

“Cooperatives, where a group of fishers work together to catch, market their products, and share the associated costs and revenues did better in environments with more environmental variability, particularly when cooperative members had access to exclusive areas to fish,” Nenadović noted. On the other hand, he said, patrons, who own multiple boats and employ fishers to catch, but usually do not fish themselves, performed better in places with higher ocean productivity and where socioeconomic conditions of local communities were more equitable.

Nenadović says these findings allow the group to start outlining the initial building blocks for a theory of governance fit that better incorporates the context found in fisheries systems.

A framework for fisheries

Nenadović studies marine social-ecological systems, or SES. The science of SES, an emerging field that includes scholars working in diverse social and environmental contexts, emphasizes the interconnected and interdependent nature of people and the environment, he says.

“By bringing together the key social components, such as governance arrangements, fishing communities, and decision-makers, and the ecological components, such as species, habitats, and ecosystem dynamics, we examine how the interactions among people and other system components shape outcomes like sustainability, equity, and resilience,” Nenadović says.

One of the successes of this project, as Nenadović pointed out, is due to the expertise and contextual knowledge of its members. Colleagues such as Octavio Aburto (Scripps Institution of Oceanography), Xavier Basurto and Fiorenza Micheli (Stanford University), Heather Leslie (University of Maine), Jorge Torre (COBI), and Amy Hudson Weaver (formerly at Niparaja), have multi-decade experience working in this region on issues ranging from oceanography, ecology, and marine biology, to governance, and community organizing. Understanding the local context is essential for the meaningful and effective implementation of the SES framework.

Both types of governance systems, individualistic and collective, exist around the world, not only in fisheries but also in other natural resource management contexts, like forest and water management. The prevalence of one type versus the other often reflects historical, cultural, economic, and ecological conditions. In many cases, the pattern varies not only across countries but even among single communities within the same country.

Countries such as Mexico, India, and several Pacific Island states have long-standing traditions of collective or community-based fisheries governance. In the United States, regions such as New England and Alaska also have notable histories of cooperative or collective arrangements.

Nenadović and his colleagues examined 20 commercially important species in the Baja Sur region. Some, such as triggerfish, whitefish, and croaker, are primarily harvested for local or regional markets. In contrast, high-value species such as abalone, red snapper, and lobster are largely destined for international markets.

“One key takeaway from this study,” he says, “is that sustainable resource use in small-scale fisheries is not necessarily determined by nature of the governance type, but by how well a given governance arrangement fits the social-ecological context in which it operates.”

Their paper also investigated how area-based fishery tools, specifically government-regulated fishing concessions, impact fisheries sustainability. One of the best-known examples of a fishing concession system is Chile’s loco fishery (sea snail), which has been managed through area based management since the 1990s. This arrangement has helped rebuild stocks, strengthen local stewardship, and provide stable benefits to fishing communities.

New England to the world

Nenadović first became interested in the governance side of fisheries as a marine biology student at Suffolk University. He spent considerable time in the Cobscook Bay region of downeast Maine and observed multiple small-scale fisheries firsthand, from lobster and kelp to periwinkles and clams.

“I became fascinated by the ways social and ecological dynamics interact across different fisheries,” he says. “Seeing these systems up close sparked my interest in the governance arrangements that shape their outcomes and, over time, crystallized in the following general question that now drives my work: What types of fisheries governance arrangements, and under what conditions, lead to sustainable and resilient social and ecological outcomes?”

Crafting an effective fisheries management regime is inextricably linked to understanding the social-ecological context in which a particular fishery operates, Nenadović says.

“There are no panaceas in fisheries governance; no single policy instrument, institutional design, or technological fix that can be universally applied,” he said. “What works well in one place may fail in another, because fisheries are embedded in a dynamic and coupled human-natural system.”

He also notes that management authorities must develop approaches around these social-ecological realities instead of expecting them to fit a particular management tool.

“It is a question of institutional fit: which form of governance arrangements aligns best with the local conditions that will result in sustainable and resilient outcomes for fishing communities and the ecosystem,” Nenadović says.

This project was supported by the National Science Foundation.