Project Findings

An integrated social, economic, and ecological analysis of fisheries performance (Micheli et al., in preparation). In our collaborative work, we have addressed the question of what processes and conditions influence the variable performance (defined in its most general terms as the total human-ecological outcomes of the fishery) of fisheries of the Pacifico Norte from an interdisciplinary perspective. An interdisciplinary approach has revealed complex interactions and feedbacks between biophysical and human components of fisheries that simpler disciplinary conceptual models of fishery outcomes “driven” by ecological or economic or social factors would have missed. First, we found that the varied natural capital endowment of each cooperative’s fishing territory, and the varied socio-economic context of the individual communities in which cooperatives are based combine to produce highly varied performance of fisheries among the cooperatives. Second, we observed that fishery access rights (and their implications for capacity to make and enforce management rules) produce vastly different outcomes for different fisheries, even when they are conducted by a single cooperative. These results highlight that evaluations of performance of multi-species fisheries should be done at the scale of cooperatives (or other relevant social and economic units of fishing) and should consider the full set of activities, rather than focusing on individual, species-specific fisheries. This is because social and ecological feedbacks are at play between different fisheries conducted by the same cooperative – a fact that easily could be overlooked or downplayed in a more traditional disciplinary approach. Overall this analysis shows how an interdisciplinary approach using both quantitative and qualitative analyses provides a more complete and useful evaluation of fisheries performance than disciplinary assessments focusing on ecological, social or economic components separately. Importantly, this analysis reveals that broader, ecosystem-based rather than species-based access rights and the development of new markets and incentives for valuing multiple species and whole ecosystems are two important mechanisms for increasing the resilience (e.g., sustained performance) of these fisheries in the face of anticipated future change.