Supporting the Small-Scale Fisheries Guidelines Implementation in Senegal: Alternatives to Top-Down Research

Abstract

The Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-scale Fisheries in the Context of Food Security and Poverty Eradication (SSF Guidelines) provide a generally accepted framework that emerged from 3 years of intense bottom-up consultations and that were finally endorsed by the FAO’s Fisheries Committee (COFI) in 2014. Chapter 11 emphasizes the importance of information, research, and communication that is accessible to and involves small-scale fishers and their communities. Research questions in conventional research tend to meet the needs of donors or partners while the needs of the researched are only purportedly addressed. In this chapter, we explore types of research that attempt to understand local knowledge produced and seek ways to facilitate communication and exchange between different modes of knowledge production that overcome the sense of exclusion currently experienced by small-scale operators. The ability to access other sources of knowledge is important to their coping strategies, especially under conditions of advanced globalization of markets for fisheries products that result in changing working and living conditions. Field research conducted with fishers and summarized here focus on fishers’ knowledge and perceptions. Implementing the SSF Guidelines will require a sustained process of building trust, mutual understanding, and institutional arrangements that enable respectful multi-directional communication and exchange. Our research suggests that where such conditions are created and sustained, they form a robust base for participatory and legitimate management and thus retain many of the positive social and distributional dimensions that could make small-scale fisheries central to food security and sustainable livelihoods.