| dc.description.abstract | Marine social-ecological systems are threatened by multiple and overlapping human pressures
(including overfishing, pollution, climate change) resulting in long-term trajectories of
environmental degradation and decline. Governance and management responses to deal with
these changes have been small, fragmented, incremental and inadequate. Recent years have seen
a call for major transformational changes, but shifting from conventional approaches to new
multilevel, participatory, flexible governance approaches has proven to be difficult. In Chile, a
trend towards multilevel participatory governance has begun to be manifest in a rescaling of
small-scale fisheries governance, mixing ‘top-down’ directives from government with ‘bottomup’
approaches in which fishers participate directly in policy implementation. Initially this trend
took the form of a co-management approach, which granted exclusive territorial user rights
(TURFs) to artisanal fishers for the management of benthic resources. More recently, in 2013,
Chile passed legislation to further transform resource management through the creation of what
have been termed Management Plans. The Management Plan legal framework allows the
fisheries agencies, in a joint process with artisanal fishers and the fishing industry, to create a
multi-stakeholder, multi-scale management committee and a fishery management plan for what
are currently de facto open access areas. This talk reviews these governance transformations
with special emphasis at identifying different dimensions of adaptive capacity, mainly agency
and social capital. It emphasizes on the challenges of co-production of knowledge and scale
dynamics as enabling conditions to tip and maintain the coastal social-ecological system into
new sustainable pathways. The empirical examples provide a basis to examine both the
challenges of adaptive capacity in governance transformations and how opportunities to
increase adaptive capacity might be further fostered. This presentation is part of the session
“Building adaptations to transformative change in coastal regions”.
Contributed session oral presentation:
Socio-cultural transformations and environmental change in Solomon | |
