Women’s experiences in influencing and shaping small-scale fisheries governance

Abstract

This paper synthesizes current empirical evidence on how women experience, shape and influence small-scale fisheries (SSF) governance. Our synthesis addresses an important gap in the literature, and helps highlight the opportunities to improve women's participation in governance and advance gender equality. We identified, characterized and synthesized 54 empirical cases at the intersection of gender and SSF governance, which comprise the relevant body of literature. Our review confirms the need to embed gender in the empirical examination of SSF governance towards expanding the current evidence base on this topic. We found that the institutional contexts within which women participate reflect a broad spectrum of arrangements, including the interactions with rules and regulations; participatory arrangements such as co-management; and informal norms, customary practices and relational spaces. We also synthesized a typology of governance tasks performed by women in SSF. The typology includes leadership roles and active participation in decision-making; relational networking and collective action; exercising agency and legitimacy; resource monitoring; knowledge sharing; meeting attendance (with no/less participation in decision-making); and activism and mass mobilization. Furthermore, we drew broader insights based on the patterns that emerged across the literature and highlighted implications for improving women's meaningful participation in SSF governance. For example, exploring the breadth of governance arrangements to include all governance spaces where women are active, adjusting governance arrangements to respond to current and emerging barriers, and recognizing how women's efforts link with societal values may help legitimize their representation in SSF governance. Findings of this review should be of interest to the scholarly community, practitioners and policymakers alike and inform future research agendas, policy dialogues and practice intervention.