Bennett, A, and Basurto, X. World Development

The expansion of global seafood trade creates opportunities as well as risks for small-scale fisheries (SSFs) livelihoods. Markets provide economic opportunity, but without effective governance, high demand can drive resource degradation. In the context of small-scale sea cucumber fisheries in Yucatán, Mexico, this study documents local governance responses to new markets and identifies factors driving those responses. We conducted a comparative case study of two SSF communities, collecting participant observation and interview data during 16 months of fieldwork. Our study found that local rules-in-use did not match government regulations and that the emergence of local rules was shaped by relations of production in each study site. Specifically, patron–client relationships promoted an open access regime that expanded local fishing fleets while fishing cooperatives attempted to restrict access to local fishing grounds through collective action and multi-level linkages with government. We propose that the different material incentives arising from the way that patron–client relationships and cooperatives organize labor, capital, and profits help explain these divergent governance responses. We hypothesize that this finding is generalizable beyond the study context, especially given that patron–client relationships and cooperatives are common throughout the world’s SSFs. This finding builds on previous research that indicates local institutions can mediate the effects of market pressures, showing that the emergence of local rules depends on how resource users are organized not just in relation to resource governance but vis-à-vis the markets themselves. Therefore, effective policies for SSFs facing market pressures require a greater emphasis on regulating local-level trade and governing the commercial aspects of fishing livelihoods. These lessons are relevant to the estimated 540 million individuals whose livelihoods SSFs support who may increasingly engage in the global seafood trade. Read more.

Basurto, X, Blanco, E, Nenadovic, M, and Vollan, B. Science Advances

Trust and cooperation constitute cornerstones of common-pool resource theory, showing that "prosocial" strategies among resource users can overcome collective action problems and lead to sustainable resource governance. Yet, antisocial behavior and especially the coexistence of prosocial and antisocial behaviors have received less attention. We broaden the analysis to include the effects of both "prosocial" and "antisocial" interactions. In MPA sites, prosocial and antisocial behavior is significantly higher, and the presence of antisocial behavior does not seem to have a negative effect on prosocial behavior. We suggest that market integration, economic diversification, and strengthened group identity in MPAs are the main potential mechanisms for the simultaneity of prosocial and antisocial behavior we observed. This study constitutes a first step in better understanding the interaction between prosociality and antisociality as related to natural resources governance and conservation science, integrating literatures from social psychology, evolutionary anthropology, behavioral economics, and ecology. Read more.

Nenadović, M, Basurto, X, and Weaver, AH. The Journal of Environment & Development.

The need for strengthening fishers' adaptive capacity has been proposed in the literature as an important component of effective fisheries governance arrangements in the presence of rising numbers of external drivers of change. Within the context of small-scale fisheries, government subsidies have been the main tool used for increasing adaptive capacity. We examine the relationship among adaptive capacity, subsidy programs, and fishers' participation in fisheries management, as a potentially important mediating factor affecting outcomes using a data set from two periods of a fishing community in Baja California Sur, Mexico. Our results show a correlation between those fishers with access to decision-making venues and their reception of subsidies, yet the effect of participation and subsidies on fishers' adaptive capacity is limited. This appears to be due to the authorities' lack of commitment to strengthening fishers' adaptive capacity through subsidies programs, and fishers' lack of trust in the governance processes. Read more.