Opportunities and Challenges for Sustainability in Small-Scale Fisheries Embedded in Protected Areas

ANA CINTI; LUISA RAMÍREZ; MAURICIO CASTREJÓN; STUART FULTON; JAIME ABURTO; DANIELA ALARCON; FRANCISCO FERNÁNDEZ; LUCIANA LOTO; MARIO RUEDA; ALEXANDRE SCHIAVETTI ; JOSÉ MARÍA ORENSANZ; ANA MARÍA PARMA

Cartagena

Congreso; 28th International Congress for Conservation Biology. Insights for Sustaining Life on Earth; 2017

Society for Conservation Biology

Many Latin American (LA) small-scale fisheries (SSFs) operate within ecologically sensitive areas, where reconciling conservation with resource use is sociallyand politically challenging due to the large number of people involved that depend on fishing for their livelihoods. Diverse institutional arrangements have been independently designed and implemented in several LA countries to accommodate SSFs (among other uses) within various forms of multiple-use marine protected areas (MPAs). Examples include the Brazilian Reservas Extrativistas Marinhas, the Biosphere Reserves (e.g. Mexico), the Mangrove Exploitation Areas of Ecuador, the Integrated Regional Management Districts of Colombia, and the Marine Parks and Natural Protected Areas of Chile and Argentina. In these MPAs, the need to attend to conservation has created both opportunities and challenges for SSFs management. MPAs may affect fisheries in a number of positive and negative ways, including how rules of access and resource use are defined, the decision-making arrangements, the level of resource and environmental stewardship attained, the effort devoted to and the effectiveness of monitoring and enforcement, among others. We hypothesize that the sign-positive or negative- of these effects is associated with the origin of the MPAs (e.g. top down, bottom up, mixed). We analyze a collection of case studies of SSFs from LA, all of which operate inside MPAs that differ in origin, design, and implementation. We aim to provide insights on the following questions: 1. How do the diverse formats of MPAs affect relevant aspects of SSFgovernance?; 2. Are those effects associated with the origin of MPAs?; and 3.Which factors (besides origin) have positively or negatively affected the sustainability of SSFs embedded in MPAs? This analysis highlights the diversity of local conditions that need to be considered in the quest for solutions that accommodate diverse goals in complex social-ecological systems.