Abstract:
The contribution of small-scale fisheries (SSF) to nutrition, food security,
employment generation, and poverty eradication in the developing world is
substantial. Co-management, which is a participatory management approach
involving the fishers, state, other stakeholders, and relevant external agents, is
endorsed by many practitioners as an effective strategy to address major issues in SSF
caused by the increased dependence on ecosystem services, economic globalization,
and climate change. In this paper, a systematic literature review with content analysis
of selected case studies was employed to explore the challenges to mainstream comanagement
in the process of SSF development. Lessons learned from four countries,
i.e., Uruguay, Zambia, Timor Leste, and Sri Lanka, have been evaluated. The key
objective of this paper is to propose suitable measures to do away with the challenges
affecting co-management. The results indicate that number of governance,
institutional and socio-economic factors affect the installation and functioning of comanagement
platforms. The lack of appropriate policies and legal frameworks to
support community engagement and the non-recognition of customary laws of
communities by the state is the key governance issues. Institutional issues include
feeble community setup, corruption in local organizations that hampers the prevention
of illegal and destructive fishing activities, the non-participation of fishers in critical
management activities such as the preparation of regulations, monitoring, and
environmental management, and the inability of community organizations to
adequately represent the interests of communities. Issues such as long-standing
conflicts between small-scale fishers and government agencies and between small and
large-scale fishers, a lack of instant tangible benefits for fishers, and unsatisfactory
adaptation to changing socio-economic and environmental circumstances have been
identified as the major socio-economic challenges. Implementing the Voluntary
Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-scale Fisheries (SSF Guidelines) adopted
by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in 2014 is recommended as a key
strategy to address major challenges to co-management.
