'Tangled in their own (safety)-nets'? Resilience, adaptability, and transformability of fishing communities in the face of the World fisheries crisis

This proposal relates to the 'Resource scarcity, growth, and poverty reduction' research theme under this call and it is titled 'Tangled in their (own) safety-nets?' Resilience, adaptability, and transformability of small-scale fishing communities in the face of the World fisheries crisis.

The overall aim of the project is to use the most recent progress in resilience thinking and wellbeing research to provide a policy-relevant analysis of the world fisheries crisis and its human consequences. This crisis is one incidence of the increasing scarcity of natural resources that is being experienced globally as a result of population growth, globalization and increased consumption per capita, among other factors. In the case of fisheries in developing countries, this situation is exacerbated by the increasing numbers of people who rely on fishing to maintain their livelihood and the use of more powerful and more efficient fishing equipment. As a result, today a large number of fish stocks are considered to be overexploited and there is a growing consensus that the overall fishing effort needs to be curbed significantly if the sustainability of the world fisheries is to be restored. But how can policy reforms aimed at significantly reducing fishing efforts be implemented in a way that prevents the millions of resource poor people that depend on fishing from falling deeper into deprivation and food insecurity?

So far one of the main reasons why policy-makers and researchers have not been able to reconcile these two priorities - to restore the sustainability of fisheries and to protect the livelihoods of the fishers - has been their difficulty to comprehend the full reasons why fishers remain in fisheries even when their catches are declining and their income is continuously reducing. This project is based on the promise that, the concepts of resilience and wellbeing, combined together, offer a framework that can improve our understanding of the ability and willingness of fishing communities to react (adapt, change, or resist) in the face of eroding living conditions, and thus provide insights into some of the critical factors influencing these individuals and fishing communities' adaptive behaviour in relation to the current fisheries crisis.

While economists see this question in terms of opportunity costs and 'rational' utility maximization, social scientists and others emphasize the importance of understanding the subjective elements that guide a person's behaviour. In this context, the wellbeing research offers a complementary way to explain people's needs, and the resilience strategies they adopt to meet those needs, by unfolding the material, relational and subjective dimensions of fishers' lives. This approach acknowledges that fishing may be as much 'a way of life' as 'a way of making a living'.

The project is built around 4 country case studies: Sri Lanka and Vietnam in South Asia; Ghana in sub-Saharan Africa; and the Fiji in the Pacific region. These have been selected as countries where small-scale fisheries play an critical role in the livelihoods of people (in terms of income and food security) and where the risk of coastal resource over-exploitation is very high.

The project will generate evidence guiding policy-makers towards more appropriate means and actions needed to address the fisheries crisis and to reconcile inclusive growth with resource conservation. The publication of the project's findings in top international journals, alongside other forms of academic and policy dissemination, is also expected to lead to the development and inclusion of new research questions and new analyses in the agenda of scientific communities. The immediate beneficiaries of the research activities will be the group of partners involved in the four case studies while the ultimate beneficiaries will be the millions of people in developing countries whose livelihood is jeopardized by this global fisheries crisis.

The ultimate beneficiaries of this project are the men and women engaged in small-scale fisheries and related formal and informal activities (fish trading and processing). This accounts for more than 117 million people in the developing world, who are increasingly affected by the world fisheries crisis. In the medium term, the awareness and capacity of national and international policy-makers will be raised by the provision of science-based analysis guiding their decisions about the means and actions needed to address this global crisis and to reconcile inclusive growth with resource conservation. Beyond direct fish-dependent households, producers and other enterprises linked to the sector through economic multipliers will also benefit from improved resource stocks, enhanced productivity and entrepreneurship opportunities stemming from supportive inclusive growth policies. Longer term benefits will be on consumers' nutrition and welfare and society at large in the developing countries where small-scale fisheries are prevalent, through increased access to quality food, employment, value added and revenues generated by the higher contribution of these small-scale fisheries to the national economy.

Another major group of beneficiaries are researchers of various horizons, ranging from fisheries economists and socio-anthropologists, to academics with wider interests in resilience and adaptation to change, the use of wellbeing as an analytical framework to understand individuals' decisions and behaviour, and the questions of the contribution of specific sectoral activities to inclusive growth. The publication of the project's findings in top international journals is expected to lead to the subsequent development and inclusion of new research questions and new analyses in the agenda of those scientific communities, within and beyond the direct area of influence of this project.

Ripple impacts are further expected and uptake of results and recommendations more widely disseminated through the involvement of the WorldFish Center. Being an international research organisation strongly linked to other global actors (FAO, World Bank, ADB), this organization will offer an additional global dimension to the project's results. Direct access to the research will enhance its pivotal role as policy-broker and strengthen the impact of its guidance internationally. In addition, close interactions will be developed with the newly launched initiative on Voluntary Guidelines on Securing Sustainable Small-scale Fisheries (FAO 2011) and the FAO's Global Programme to improve Fisheries and Aquaculture, which are shaping and supporting the fisheries agenda at the global level.

The advisory involvement of the WorldFish Center will also ensure a strong connection with the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and the national agricultural actors with which this group is linked. The project will also liaise and feed into strategic initiatives including the Global Program on Fisheries project supported jointly by the World Bank and FAO, and the new Regional Fisheries Program operating in West Africa and funded by the World Bank and USAID. In the Pacific, outputs from the project will complement the recent extensive review of fisheries policy and adaptation capacity that was implemented by the WorldFish Center and its partners and funded by the Asian Development Bank across five countries (PNG, Fiji, Solomon Islands, Timor Leste, Vanuatu).

Targeted outputs will be issued throughout the project to allow rapid dissemination of findings to key audiences: practitioners, professional stakeholders, and policy-makers via established networks and knowledge dissemination support (e.g. Eldis), and partners' national and international constituencies (e.g. the ICSF). Internally, interactive engagement with all partners will be maintained through support visits, workshops at key project stages and electronic consultations.