Governing Change in Small-Scale Fisheries: Theories and Assumptions

Abstract

Small-scale fisheries communities are caught between local necessities and external demands. Globalization brings new challenges, but also opportunities. Climate change is a real threat to future survival, and small-scale fisheries communities are particularly vulnerable to natural hazards. Poverty is an issue, also in the context of climate change, as both are intimately linked. Small-scale fisheries communities are, therefore, undergoing social and ecological change, but change is not the same as progress, and adaptation is not synonymous to development. Change is empirical, something that can be measured and forecasted, whereas progress is ethical and political. With the Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries in the Context of Food Security and Poverty Eradication (SSF Guidelines), we now have an authoritative notion of what progress is supposed to mean in small-scale fisheries globally. However, going from such ideas, via practical interventions, to real development is a stretch. Here, governance matters, but governance can mean several things, is in itself ethical and political, and in need of a constructive process that transcends different disciplines and scales. This chapter discusses what it would take to make change become progress in small-scale fisheries.