Abstract:
In tropical countries Small-scale Fisheries (SSF) contribute to more than half of the total fisheries catch and provide employment, food security, and poverty alleviation for numerous communities in coastal areas. Concerns about the sustainability of SSF have been raised as many of these fisheries are fully exploited or overexploited and conventional fisheries management has not always been successful in addressing the underlying factors of overfishing. Frequently this is a result of not taking into account the fishing impacts on ecosystems, or the complexity of SSF as social-ecological systems.
Coastal ecosystems are reaching dangerous tipping points, and considering the large contributions of SSF in tropical areas, it is vital to opt for novel and holistic approaches to fisheries management intended to foster transformational change at the systemic level. However, there is limited understanding of what transformational change looks like in tropical SSF or where to intervene. Using the Costa Rican Pacific coast as a case study, specifically the Gulf of Nicoya (GoN), this dissertation aimed to: (1) highlight the need for transformative responses and changes; (2) identify and classify the range of interventions currently applied to address overfishing in the context of a tropical coastal area; finally (3) to provide a basis for prioritizing research and management to navigate more desirable and sustainable directions in tropical SSF systems.
For transforming social-ecological systems to a more sustainable state, it is necessary to understand where an how to intervene. Based on systems theory, leverage points correspond to places within complex systems where a small shift in one thing can produce large changes in everything, ranging from shallow to deep leverage. In this thesis, three different studies were developed to shed light on deep leverage points: (1) rethink systems of ecological knowledge (local ecological knowledge -LEK- and a food web model, Ecopath with Ecosim), (2) marine education to reconnect human behavior with ecosystem resilience and (3) restructure institutions by incorporating heterogeneity and plurality in research and management. Later, building on the outcomes of these studies, current GoN management interventions were identified and classified according to their potential to alter the behavior of the social-ecological properties within the SSF system (interplay between shallow and deep leverage points).
The overall results suggest that fisheries management in the GoN is carried out primarily from a single-species approach, which has its place, but altering the course of the fishing system requires a lens in social-ecological systems. Based on this, here seven priorities for research and management are highlighted to move towards systems management and more sustainable trajectories for tropical SSF: (1) integrating LEK and scientific information to address environmental issues; (2) raise awareness about the ecological impacts of fishing, by educating and reconnecting human behavior with ecosystem resilience and with people’ intrinsic abilities to act pro-environmentally; (3) inter-and-transdisciplinary research that prioritizes collaboration and the voice of women and other groups typically marginalized in decision making; (4) address plural values and mindsets that shape emerging goals, norms and institutions; (5) more relational definitions of SSF; (6) recognize ecological roles within the food web and opt for management interventions that preserve biodiversity (e.g., redundancy of low-medium trophic level groups and biomass rebuilding of high trophic level species); and (7) deliberating on ecosystem-based planning tools to join scientists, fishers, government, and private sector in a common vision of desirable futures.