Introduction

The ongoing erosion of fisheries ecosystems and the context of rapid market-driven change and increasing climate instability require intensified efforts to make small-scale fisheries more resilient. One potentially significant contribution to these efforts is the social wellbeing perspective. While hardly a new concept, wellbeing has been widely embraced in recent years as a way to expand beyond narrow income measures of development success. In fisheries, where the focus on rent generation has often dominated policy, wellbeing builds on longstanding counter currents arguing that fisheries governance will be more successful if not driven solely by a focus on rent maximization but instead considers the numerous contextual factors that shape fisher decision making. Wellbeing has the advantage of being intuitively appealing and yet, in forms such as the social wellbeing perspective (cf. McGregor et al. 2007), also providing a richly worked out analytical perspective that can be applied to fisheries and other sectors.

The Governing Small-scale Fishers project (GSF) is funded by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) for the period 2009-2012. It brings together Canadian and international fisheries scholars and WorldFish scientists to think through the potential contributions of social wellbeing approach for fisheries governance. The project is largely conceptual, drawing on the extensive experience of the participants, with the incorporation of two to three rapid field visits for the purpose of checking developing ideas about the relevance of wellbeing. The overall goal of the GSF project is to improve the poverty-reduction outcomes of governance reforms in small-scale fisheries in developing countries. This will be achieved by developing a conceptual and practical understanding of how wellbeing considerations may be fully incorporated into fisheries governance reforms, and correspondingly into the design of fisheries management instruments.

To date (as of August 2011) the project team has had three brainstorming workshops and two field consultations from which is emerging a set of written outputs that will report on the main ideas arising from the project. The ambitions of the project and preliminary versions of project outputs have been presented in a number of forums. A final workshop remains to refine written outputs for the project and, funds permitting, a final field consultation may be undertaken as well.

Future Ambitions

To take the ideas forward that the GSF project has developed, the intention of the project team is to follow our conceptual efforts with empirical and policy-oriented research. This may be accomplished through a single large-scale project linking cases in different parts of the globe or it may be achieved through connecting a series of smaller parallel projects funded from different sources.

Contact information:

Derek Johnson, University of Manitoba:  johnso39@cc.umanitoba.ca

Acknowledgement:

Governing Small-scale Fisheries for Wellbeing and Resilience: A Canada WorldFish Center Collaborative Project was funded by the Canadian International Development Agency through its CGIAR-Canada Linkage Fund Program.