Leveraging Local Experience to Improve Sustainability of Global Fisheries: It Is Not About Tools But Processes

The quest for management approaches to achieve sustainable fisheries has often led to prescriptions of technical fixes and tools for assessment, harvest control, and regulation of access privileges, without due regard to local context and relevant socio-ecological fishery attributes. Strengthened legal mandates introduced to curve overfishing in several regions, on the other hand, while successful on many accounts, have also forced specific management approaches, restricting the range of acceptable options. It is increasingly recognized, however, that the efficacy of different approaches varies with the fishery, and that the success of any generic tool, no matter how adequate in principle, depends on the details of its implementation, and on the existence of enabling institutions and effective governance. The diversity of possible approaches is perhaps best illustrated by small-scale coastal fisheries, where the spatial dimension of both resources and fishing communities opens up a diverse spectrum of possibilities for harvesting strategies and regulation of access. Experience with a collection of cases illustrates that local successes cannot be scaled up simply by replication. While lessons still emerge to leverage local results, they emphasize process and involvement of stakeholders in the identification of solutions rather than the specific tools applied in each case.