Cross-scale mechanisms and adaptation strategies in Small-Scale Fisheries

Abstract: Small-Scale Fisheries (SSF) are increasingly facing shocks and changes that affect their capacity to provide food and maintain the livelihoods of millions of people who depend on fishing activities. At the same time, SSF influence and are influenced by interactions across scales, where interdependencies between different places are increasingly evident. In this context, there is a need to better understand actors’ adaptation to such changes, explicitly considering actors that participate in post-harvesting activities and their associated cross-scale interactions. This licentiate thesis aims to understand cross-scale mechanisms that influence the adaptation strategies of SSF actors to environmental changes. The first manuscript (Paper I), contributes towards understanding the spatial diversification (or the mobility of fisheries actors across space) in response to environmental changes. The second manuscript (Paper II), investigates how local trade networks can influence the resilience of fish provision at the individual and the system level. Both manuscripts analyze the influence of the social and social- ecological context in which SSF actors are embedded. They address the effect of fisheries institutions and policies (Paper I), and of the social-ecological network structures in which trading takes place (i.e. local trade networks in Paper II). To investigate these cross-scale mechanisms, I use a combination of methods consisting of network analysis and agent-based modelling, grounded in qualitative empirical research of the case study of Baja California Sur, Mexico. Such combination of structural and dynamic research approaches, with the understanding of a single case study, allows to untangle and interrogate how structures and mechanisms interact in SSF. The results of the two manuscripts describe cross-scale mechanisms in SSF to investigate actors’ adaptation strategies to different environmental changes. They show how such adaptation can create interdependencies between different places, which may ultimately influence outcomes associated to the resilience of SSF at different scales. In addition, the results show how institutions, social and social-ecological relationships can play an important role in influencing the capacities of small-scale fishery actors to adapt to environmental changes. In this way, this licentiate contributes to the cross-scale understanding of small-scale food production systems from a social-ecological perspective.