The importance of land infrastructure for supporting coastal fisheries has long been acknowledged; its role in remote and geographically challenged fishing communities in the Nordic Arctic has visibly impacted community structure and development. This paper explores the Red King Crab (RKC) fishery in Norway and the ways in which its...
Subsidies are most often discussed within global fora (such as the World Trade Organization) in terms of concerns over trade distortions, if some countries gain an unfair advantage, through their subsidies, over unsubsidized industry elsewhere. In fisheries, this concern is matched by an environmental argument – that fish stock depletion...
This presentation explores the interaction of the fishery sector and the emerging push for marine biodiversity conservation. These are viewed as two ‘streams’ of governance – flowing through global bodies (notably the United Nations), through nations (with interacting environmental and fisheries agencies), and through thousands of coastal communities worldwide (which...
To effectively respond to sustainability challenges, there is a need to find (or re-discover) suitable ways to govern, so as to make decisions that maintain healthy environments and sustainable livelihoods in fishery systems. While efforts to this end are needed at all governance levels, from the global to the local,...
Marine protected areas (MPAs) have become a widely used tool for marine conservation and fisheries management. In coastal areas, it has become clear that the success of MPAs, and the achievement of sustainable fishery production, requires a combination of effective management and conservation frameworks, maintenance of decent fisheries livelihoods, and...
There is increasing recognition that the oceans of the world support a wide range of economic sectors. Managing those multiple uses, within a ‘commons’ environment, is undoubtedly challenging. Approaches of ecosystem-based management (EBM), integrated ocean management (IOM) and marine spatial planning (MSP), with associated aspects of spatial allocation and conflict...
This document provides a summary of a Special Session held at the IIFET 2016 Scotland conference in July 2016. The registration number and title of the special session were 5329: Sustainability of Fisheries and Aquaculture: the Multidisciplinary Approach as a Key for Success. The session was organized by Elisa Ravagnan....
Climate change will have a wide range of impacts on fisheries, other human uses of marine systems, and the coastal communities that depend on the ocean for their livelihoods. This presentation focuses on small-scale fisheries, providing a review of the current state of knowledge on social and economic impacts of...
Transdisciplinary approaches and innovative combinations of social and ecological theory are required to deal with complexity and change in fisheries and other human-ecological systems. This paper examines the interplay and complementarities that emerge by linking resilience and social wellbeing approaches to better understand and govern fisheries. After first discussing the...
Small-scale fisheries are no exceptions to the requirements of staying within the biological bounds of sustainability, by purposively limiting fish harvests, and of maintaining productivity of oceans and freshwater systems, by protecting ecosystem health and habitat quality. However, while these fisheries, like all others, have the potential to pose conservation...
Decades of social science research has shown that fisheries, particularly small-scale, are integral to
community wellbeing. They contribute to food security, men’s, women’s, and children’s livelihoods,
health, community identity, and social cohesion. These contributions need to be well-defined and
contextualized, as well as differentiated between fishing sectors, for better fisheries...
Community fishery rights are use rights (the right to take part in fishing) and/or management rights (the right to be involved in managing the fishery) implemented at a local, community level. While by no means a new invention, community rights are receiving renewed attention as a mechanism to improve the...
This paper explores how the implementation of appropriate policy measures and underlying institutions can support sustainability and resilience in fishery systems. The policies discussed fall into three categories. First are those relating directly to fishery management, including the development of a management portfolio, application of the precautionary approach, and implementation...
This paper reports on the first comprehensive study of economic and livelihood considerations relating to inland fisheries in common property lands (ejidos) of the Mayan Zone in Quintana Roo, Mexico. Given the data-sparse nature of these fisheries, a fishery assessment approach was used which linked methods from both the natural...
This paper provides summaries of presentations at a special session of IIFET 2012 that explored the potential value of a ‘wellbeing’ approach in small-scale fisheries, drawing on insights from the Governing Small-Scale Fisheries for Wellbeing and Resilience project. The research aimed to apply wellbeing concepts to both better understand fishery...
In 2011 the FAO Committee on Fisheries tasked FAO with the development of an international instrument in the form of guidelines for securing sustainable small-scale fisheries (SSF Guidelines). The SSF Guidelines will facilitate the empowerment and mobilization of stakeholders to promote change towards sustainable small-scale fisheries and hence facilitate the...