Table Of ContentMARE Publication Series 17
Derek S. Johnson
Tim G. Acott
Natasha Stacey
Julie Urquhart Editors
Social Wellbeing
and the Values
of Small-scale
Fisheries
MARE Publication Series
Volume 17
Series editors
Maarten Bavinck, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
[email protected]
Svein Jentoft, UiT – The Arctic University of Norway, Norway
[email protected]
The MARE Publication Series is an initiative of the Centre for Maritime Research
(MARE). MARE is an interdisciplinary social-science network devoted to studying
the use and management of marine resources. It is based jointly at the University of
Amsterdam and Wageningen University (www.marecentre.nl).
The MARE Publication Series addresses topics of contemporary relevance in the
wide field of ‘people and the sea’. It has a global scope and includes contributions
from a wide range of social science disciplines as well as from applied sciences.
Topics range from fisheries, to integrated management, coastal tourism, and
environmental conservation. The series was previously hosted by Amsterdam
University Press and joined Springer in 2011.
The MARE Publication Series is complemented by the Journal of Maritime
Studies (MAST) and the biennial People and the Sea Conferences in Amsterdam.
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/10413
Derek S. Johnson • Tim G. Acott
Natasha Stacey • Julie Urquhart
Editors
Social Wellbeing
and the Values of Small-scale
Fisheries
Editors
Derek S. Johnson Tim G. Acott
Department of Anthropology Department of History, Politics and Social
University of Manitoba Sciences
Winnipeg, MB, Canada University of Greenwich
London, UK
Natasha Stacey
Research Institute for the Environment Julie Urquhart
and Livelihoods Centre for Environmental Policy
Charles Darwin University Imperial College London
Darwin, NT, Australia London, UK
Too Big to Ignore (TBTI; toobigtoignore.net) is a global research network and knowledge
mobilization partnership, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada, and supported by 15 partner organizations and over 300 members from around the
world. The network aims at elevating the profile of small-scale fisheries, arguing against their
marginalization in national and international policies, and developing research and governance
capacity to address global fisheries challenges.
ISSN 2212-6260 ISSN 2212-6279 (electronic)
MARE Publication Series
ISBN 978-3-319-60749-8 ISBN 978-3-319-60750-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-60750-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017946484
© Springer International Publishing AG 2018
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Cover Illustration: The cover photograph was taken in the war-affected district of Trincomalee in Sri
Lanka. It depicts the culminating day of a 14 day Annual Hindu temple festival attended by both Hindu
and Buddhist fisher-folk in their fishing boats. On that day, fishing operations are completely suspended
to seek divine protection and prosperity for their lives, fishing equipment, and fishing livelihood. —
Gayathri Lokuge
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Foreword: Social Wellbeing and the Values
of Small-Scale Fisheries
Small-scale fisheries are neglected around the world. They are often overlooked by
policy-makers, and they are overlooked in public political consciousness. And yet
people around the world tend to value and cherish the small-scale, artisanal fishing
communities around their coasts. Even when these communities are being driven
out of their coastal locations by tourism or residential development, the picturesque
backdrop of the traditional fishing community, with the colourful boats, the nets
hanging on beaches and quays and the hustle, bustle and excitement of the fish trad-
ing when a catch is brought in, remains an attractive feature. The new beach hotels
will include photogenic images of local fishing communities as part of their public-
ity material, tourists love to wander along jetties or beaches looking at boats and
gear, and tourists along with more wealthy locals will flock to eat the freshest fish
and seafood in local restaurants. There is something about these communities that
inspires us.
But this is not an appeal to some kind of romantic idealisation, and the chapters
of this book do not fall into this trap. Fishing can be hard and dangerous work, and
coastal communities are often exposed to the harshness and vagaries of nature.
Losses of life are not uncommon, and in many cases, the people of coastal commu-
nities suffer from harmful wellbeing failures. Poverty and vulnerability are condi-
tions that are often endemic in small-scale fishing communities.
This mix of observations begins to gives some insight into the wellbeing conun-
drum of small-scale, artisanal fisheries. They are important in many different ways
to wellbeing, but we seem to be unable to fully recognise what these contributions
consist of and are unable to give due and serious policy attention to them. The chap-
ters in this book provide a counter to that, and they use a multidimensional concep-
tion of wellbeing to elucidate the dynamics of change and the contemporary
challenges of governance in small-scale fisheries. They explore the ways in which
the material aspects of wellbeing in these fisheries (the extent to which they provide
incomes, jobs and food) interplay with the relational and subjective dimensions of
wellbeing. They adopt a social conception of wellbeing and pay particular attention
to the relationships of production and exchange, of governance and of meaning- -
making that both construct wellbeing and also constitute it.
v
vi Foreword: Social Wellbeing and the Values of Small-Scale Fisheries
The chapters provide an invaluable richness of detail about the fisheries in ques-
tion and use the analytical leverage of wellbeing to shed fresh light on some of the
major challenges confronting small-scale fisheries at this time. They represent an
excellent resource for scholars, policy-makers and practitioners that wish to move
beyond routinised descriptions of fisheries livelihoods and the economics of ecosys-
tems under pressure.
In this sense, the volume also makes a further and wider contribution to the social
sciences and to policy thinking more generally. The authors take up the challenge
that was issued in 2009 by Joe Stiglitz, Amartya Sen and Jean-Paul Fitoussi in their
Final Report for the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance
and Social Progress,1 who asked academics and policy-makers to address them-
selves to the task of making human wellbeing a useful and meaningful concept with
which to think about and make policy for sustainable societal development and
progress.
The chapters in this book test, operationalise and advance a multidimensional
framework for understanding wellbeing outcomes and the dynamics that generate
these. They do not suffer from the types of wellbeing reductionism that are becom-
ing increasingly problematic in the wider wellbeing field: They do not reduce the
concept of wellbeing only to considerations of subjective wellbeing or happiness,
nor do they consider only the material (objectively measurable) aspects of wellbe-
ing. Rather, by using a social wellbeing framework, they show how the economic,
social, cultural and political aspects must all be taken into account if we are to better
understand the challenges that face these communities as they are swept along on a
tide of modernisation.
In the study of the development of agrarian communities, much attention was
given to the place of the peasantry in the development process, but no such discus-
sion has been conducted for small-scale, artisanal fisheries. The chapters here pro-
vide some basis for such a discussion by variously and critically exploring issues
such as processes of differentiation and inequality; of identity, community and the
significance of place; and of the evolution and erosion of values in these communi-
ties. These processes all have implications for policy thinking about the big issues
of the legitimacy of governance arrangements, sustainability and social justice.
Policy thinking for small-scale fisheries has been criticised for being dominated
by crude models that tend to be highly aggregative and to focus on the material and
biological aspects of the fishery. The upshot often has been ineffective policy and
sometimes damaging governance. The chapters in this volume should encourage
policy-makers and practitioners to think and do things differently.
These studies can encourage them to seek a better understanding of the different
wellbeing interests and strategies that are at play in such fisheries. They can then
consider explicitly the ways those different interests may be served by different
policy directions. As the chapters illustrate, the adoption of a social wellbeing fram-
ing can enable policy-makers to better appreciate some of the major trade-offs that
can flow from policy and management decisions (between different people in the
1 https://www.mysciencework.com/publication/show/502ed1c8e1e0bc2855b757c509cce4c9
Foreword: Social Wellbeing and the Values of Small-Scale Fisheries vii
fishery, between small-scale fishers and interests in the wider society and between
the fishery in the present and in the future). Not least the book points to the potential
benefits of integrating considerations of the wellbeing of fishers and their families
into governance and policy processes in small-scale fishing communities.
Department of Politics Allister McGregor
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK
March 2017
Preface and Acknowledgments
This volume is inspired by the normative framing of the project Too Big to Ignore:
Global Partnership for Small-Scale Fisheries Research (TBTI) that small-scale
fisheries globally make profoundly important contributions to the societies of which
they are part. Despite these contributions, TBTI draws attention to the fact that
small-scale fisheries are typically marginalized and often face existential threats.
While we subscribe to these claims, our intent in this book is to examine and more
carefully theorize the value assumptions that undergird TBTI’s arguments and to
provide substantive illustrations of them from different parts of the world. We argue
that the multidimensional and relational lens of the social wellbeing approach pro-
vides a ready and productive framework for critical analysis and reflection on how
values are made and contested in small-scale fisheries globally.
The contributions to this collection bring together case studies from numerous
countries in Asia, Europe, and Latin America. In each instance, chapter authors take
inspiration from the Wellbeing in Developing Countries (WeD) approach to wellbe-
ing to examine the dynamics of value in the small-scale fisheries that they are most
familiar with. One of the innovative features of the volume is that, in doing so, they
illustrate how thinking about small-scale fisheries’ values in social wellbeing terms
affords rich connections to a variety of other theoretical sources including political
economy and political ecology, feminist theory, interactive governance, and co- -
constructionism. The approach has also sparked methodological innovations and
has important implications for fisheries governance, to which many of the authors
have drawn attention.
Our first and most significant debt of gratitude is to the TBTI project funded by
the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and, particularly,
to the project lead, Dr. Ratana Chuenpagdee. Ratana and TBTI have provided the
institutional framework and support that allowed us to conceive of the idea of this
book and bring it to fruition. Particularly important in that process was the support
that TBTI gave to the book’s authors to attend the Second World Small-Scale
Fisheries Congress in Merida, Mexico, in September 2014, at which the first ver-
sions of the chapters were presented and discussed. Ratana also had an active hand
ix
x Preface and Acknowledgments
in contributing to the book intellectually and in her coauthorship of two chapters,
and we thank her for that as well.
We also would like to thank the contributors to this volume for their hard work
in response to the several rounds of revisions we requested of them and for their
quick responses to other more technical matters, often at very short notice. The
group has been a real pleasure to work with and has generated a good sense of
camaraderie over the years. Thanks also to the contributors for their patience with
an editorial process that has taken considerably longer than we had anticipated.
The book’s two anonymous external reviewers provided extremely helpful feed-
back on the initial book proposal and then on the full manuscript. We would like to
express our gratitude to them for their time, thoughtfulness, and thoroughness. The
book is much improved for their efforts.
We also appreciate the support of the MARE Publication Series editors Dr.
Maarten Bavinck and Prof. Svein Jentoft and the Springer staff Joseph Daniel and
Fritz Schmuhl for their assistance with the editorial and publication processes.
Figure 1.1 is reproduced with permission from Daniel Pauly and Island Press.
Figure 2.1 is reproduced courtesy of Springer Publishers. Figure 2.2 is reproduced
courtesy of its author, Derek Johnson.
Winnipeg, Canada Derek S. Johnson
London, UK Tim G. Acott
Darwin, Australia Natasha Stacey
London, UK Julie Urquhart
April 12, 2017
