# **Asia-Pacific Fishing Livelihoods**

**Michael Fabinyi Kate Barclay**

## Asia-Pacifc Fishing Livelihoods

Michael Fabinyi • Kate Barclay

# Asia-Pacifc Fishing Livelihoods

Michael Fabinyi Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences University of Technology Sydney Sydney, NSW, Australia

Kate Barclay Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences University of Technology Sydney Sydney, NSW, Australia

#### ISBN 978-3-030-79590-0 ISBN 978-3-030-79591-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79591-7

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## Acknowledgements

The research on which this book was based on was supported by multiple funded projects, including the Australian Research Council (ARC) (DP140101055, DP180100965), the David and Lucile Packard Foundation (2014-40093, 2017-65792), the Fisheries Research and Development Corporation (2014-301, 2017-092) and a Society in Science Branco Weiss Fellowship (Fabinyi). We also acknowledge the support of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney, the Nippon Foundation Ocean Nexus Center, the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University and the Crawford School of Public Policy at The Australian National University.

We thank our colleagues with whom we have collaborated in these projects and who helped to contribute to the ideas and arguments in the book, in particular Dedi Adhuri, Kirsten Abernethy, Eddie Allison, Wolfram Dressler, Hampus Eriksson, Simon Foale, Jeff Kinch, Nick McClean, Michael Pido, Andrew Song, Dirk Steenbergen, Reuben Sulu and Michelle Voyer.

# Contents


#### **Index** 111

# About the Authors

**Michael Fabinyi** is an associate professor in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). His research interests are focused on the social and political aspects of marine resource management and use, including coastal livelihoods, fsheries governance and fsheries trade.

**Kate Barclay** is a professor in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at UTS. Her research interests are the governance of marine areas and resources, including social and economic seafood value chains, social inclusion in fsheries and the wellbeing of people in coastal communities.

## Abbreviations


# List of Figures


# List of Tables


# Fishing Livelihoods and Fisheries Governance

**Abstract** This book centres on an understanding of fshing livelihoods within processes of historical change, and the social and political relationships within which they are embedded. Drawing on our research experience from the Asia-Pacifc region, we examine where fshing livelihoods have come from, and where they are going. This introductory chapter introduces fshing livelihoods and the governance challenge that they face, before examining social science research in greater depth. We then develop the idea of a relational approach to fshing livelihoods, describing how they are shaped by wider political and economic trajectories, by local social relationships and by institutional structures.

**Keywords** Fishing livelihood • Political ecology • Wellbeing • Fisheries governance

In recent years the oceans have been subject to a profusion of regulatory, academic and private sector attention, as calls for a 'blue economy' are envisioned and executed across the world (Jouffray et al., 2020; Voyer et al., 2018). Characterised as the 'last frontier', oceans are presented as a dual opportunity for new forms of economic exploitation and renewed efforts to sustain ecological systems. Fisheries, and the livelihoods that they support, sit in an uneasy relationship to these transformations. While fshing1 has for generations provided food and livelihoods for millions of people throughout the world, increasingly it is challenged by newer coastal and ocean-based economic activities such as tourism and energy extraction, and by progressively tightening forms of governance that seek to reduce its environmental effects. The consequences of such developments are felt in different ways across the diverse social groups involved in fshing.

This book centres on an understanding of fshing livelihoods within processes of historical change, and the social and political relationships within which they are embedded. Drawing on our research experience from the Asia-Pacifc region, we examine where fshing livelihoods have come from, and where they are going. Developing a 'relational' view of fshing livelihoods, we examine how they are shaped by wider political and economic trajectories, by local social relationships and by institutional structures. We discuss how such an understanding of fshing livelihoods can contribute to more ecologically sustainable and socially equitable governance strategies.

## Fishing Livelihoods

Across the world, fsheries provide direct employment for around 38.982 million people (Food and Agriculture Organization [FAO], 2020). In many coastal regions of the world, and particularly in many low-income contexts, fshing livelihoods remain the primary economic activity. Globally, they make signifcant contributions towards food and nutrition security, and are particularly important as a source of micronutrients, including vitamin A, omega-3, zinc, iron, calcium and selenium (Hicks et al., 2019).

Fishing livelihoods are characterised by their diversity, fexibility and dynamism, responding to changing environmental, climatic and economic conditions. It is common to differentiate between small-scale and largescale fsheries, yet there are no universally accepted criteria that distinguish between these sectors. Large-scale fsheries tend to involve larger-sized vessels that use advanced or capital-intensive technologies (e.g., trawls, purse seines), wage labour and larger frms. The livelihoods in large-scale fsheries are as employed crew, or crew who are paid a portion of the value of the catch. In contrast, small-scale fsheries tend to be more labour

<sup>1</sup>By 'fsh' we mean all seafood (e.g., including crustaceans, shellfsh, etc.) in addition to fsh. We do not include discussion of inland fshing or fshing livelihoods in this book.

<sup>2</sup>This includes part-time, seasonal and permanent work.

intensive and involve the use of smaller vessels and less capital-intensive gears (e.g., handlines, nets that can be pulled in by hand) that operate closer to shore, and are operated by individuals, households or small groups from within coastal villages. While small-scale fshers tend to sell their fsh in local or domestic markets, or consume it directly, many are also involved in export operations. For example, Indonesian fshers who work alone from wooden vessels only a couple of metres long using handlines catch yellowfn tuna sold as steaks in North America. In practice, the distinctions between small-scale and large-scale fsheries blur considerably (Johnson et al., 2005). Small-scale fsheries are estimated to account for more than 90 per cent of fshers and fsh workers (i.e., in trading and processing) (Kelleher et al., 2012), the vast majority of which are located in developing countries. While fshing is commonly thought of in relation to marine spaces, inland fsheries (the 'forgotten fsheries'; Cooke et al., 2016) account for about 12.5 per cent of total capture fsheries production (Funge-Smith & Bennett, 2019).

Beyond work in fshing alone, many livelihoods (over 100 million in total; Kelleher et al., 2012) are based around, partly or in whole, the diverse activities along the value chain—seafood processing, marketing, trading, boat and gear construction, servicing vessels and so on. Much work goes into preparing and maintaining the inputs for fshing, especially in boat and gear construction and maintenance. Post-harvest, seafood is processed in various ways. In large-scale fsheries, such as for tuna, processing plants and factories employ workers to prepare the fsh according to different market demands, such as loins, cans or fllets. For example, in North-Eastern China, vast numbers of whitefsh from Russia and other northern economies are imported, flleted and packaged, and then reexported (Clarke, 2009). In small-scale fsheries, where access to refrigeration is less common, fsh are commonly dried, smoked and/or salted.

Fish is one of the most highly traded commodities (Gephart & Pace, 2015), and this trade occurs at multiple scales. From local markets in villages, to provincial town centres, to major national markets and overseas, fsh are typically transported over land, sea and air through complex networks of traders, agents and frms. Internationally, fsh are exported to major markets including China, Japan, the European Union (EU) and North America, frequently through complex trade routes and intermediary countries that make it diffcult to track (Stoll et al., 2018). Wholesalers, retailers and restaurants then provide livelihoods for further nodes along fsheries value chains.

The current state of fsheries and their associated value chains and livelihoods is not a static picture, but is a refection of the wider historical conditions that have led to this point. Fishing of various types has been prevalent for millennia, with political and economic developments shaping its character differently in different times and places. For example, the expansion of Chinese trade networks from the late seventeenth century led to the rapid uptake of fshing for products for the Chinese market, such as dried sea cucumbers. By the mid-nineteenth century, polities such as the Sulu Sultanate were centred on this economy (Warren, 1981). As domestic markets for fsh products grew with increased populations and consumer demand, this stimulated the rise of specialised fshing communities along coastal South-East Asia (Spoehr, 1984). The foundations for industrial fsheries in South-East Asia were laid in the late 1800s and early twentieth century under European rule, and then industrial fsheries were established under Japanese imperial expansion southward in the decades preceding World War II (Butcher, 2004; Chen, 2008).

From the second half of the twentieth century, the intensifcation of globalisation brought dramatic changes to fshing livelihoods (Butcher, 2004). Increasing demand for fsh in markets such as the EU and the United States (US) stimulated production, while new fshing technologies emerged to increase the effciency of catch. Fisheries expanded geographically into new frontiers and intensifed in locations where they had already been present, including deeper down the water column. In many locations, fshing livelihoods became transformed into a market-oriented activity based on trade at local, national and global scales. Globalisation, or the process of 'time–space compression', as Harvey (1989) terms it, has increased the scale, pace and diversity of fshing activities around the world (Eriksson et al., 2015; Gephart & Pace, 2015).

Fishing livelihoods are not simply an economic process of harvesting, processing and trading to generate income. Such economic activities are embedded within (Granovetter, 1985) and intersect with diverse social relationships. The particular manner by which fshing livelihoods are operated refects wider social structures, which vary tremendously across geography and over time. For example, in many societies, fshing livelihoods are strongly gendered—men are frequently associated with fshing from boats further from shore, and women with near-shore fshing, gleaning, processing and marketing. Group identities such as ethnicity, caste, migration or religion or status can infuence who is involved in fshing. For example, in South-East Asia, Sama-Bajau people are strongly associated with fshing practices. This association is often pejorative, and they are typecast as ignorant, poor and environmentally destructive (Lowe, 2000). In the Philippines, migrants from the Visayan group of islands are closely associated with fshing in some parts of the country where they lacked access to land for farming (Eder, 2003), and seafood exporters tend to have ethnic Chinese links. Many of the 'Japanese' fshers who worked throughout Asia and northern Pacifc Island countries in the frst half of the twentieth century were Okinawan, who through the forcible incorporation of Okinawa into the Japanese Empire in the 1870s were left destitute and had to travel to fnd livelihoods (Tomiyama, 2002).

## The Governance Challenge

The environmental consequences of the progressive expansion and intensifcation of fsheries around the world have been signifcant. While there is much variability (Hilborn et al., 2020), in many cases, fsheries stocks have been overexploited. In 2017, the fraction of fsh stocks considered by the FAO (2020) to be unsustainably fshed was 34.2 per cent. Between 1950 and 2015, the catch-per-unit effort decreased by over 80 per cent in most countries (Rousseau et al., 2019). In many cases, the very viability of fshing livelihoods is under threat, following the trajectory of North American cod fsheries (Binkley, 2002).

Beyond the fsh themselves, fsh habitat and broader ecosystems have been substantially degraded. Destructive fshing gears such as dynamite, pollution, plastic debris, coastal infrastructure, shipping and agricultural run-off have negatively affected many marine ecosystems. Increasingly, the effects of climate change are being felt. The decline of coral reef systems, such as the Great Barrier Reef, is being driven primarily by coral bleaching caused by climate change (Hughes et al., 2017). Under a scenario of continued high emissions, the maximum catch potential of tropical fsh stocks in some tropical exclusive economic zones (EEZs) is projected to decline by up to 40 per cent (Lam et al., 2020). Climate change is also projected to dramatically alter marine ecosystems through additional stresses such as ocean acidifcation, deoxygenation, changing patterns of nutrient supply and storms (Henson et al., 2017).

In this context of environmental decline, fshing livelihoods have been increasingly subject to attempts to govern their nature and extent. A central concern of much governance has focused on the need to sustainably manage fsheries as natural resources. At the local level, systems of customary marine tenure have regulated access to fshing grounds in many places (Foale et al., 2011). At a higher scale, state-based governance regimes have increasingly aimed to manage and regulate capture fsheries and the marine spaces where they are found (Campling & Havice, 2018). Through the twentieth century states exerted national claims over territorial waters (usually 12 nautical miles), and progressively expanded their claims over greater distances from the land. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) emerged to codify sovereignty over EEZs in the early 1980s, and formally came into force from 1994, demarcating sovereign rights over waters 200 nm out from the coast.

In many richer countries, fsheries have been progressively managed through the use of economic instruments, founded on concepts such as maximum sustainable yield and maximum economic yield. Tools such as total allowable catches (TACs), licences and quotas are employed to regulate access to resources according to biologically determined parameters. Such instruments intersect with other regulations, including seasonal or other temporal closures, or gear restrictions. In recent decades, the concept of ecosystem-based fsheries management (EBFM) has become widely accepted, where fsheries are managed not as a single, isolated stock but with reference to the broader ecosystem of which they are part (Pikitch et al., 2004). Various forms of marine protected areas (MPAs) that spatially regulate access marine zones have become widespread as part of this.

Since the 2000s, the rise of market-based 'private governance' through various forms of certifcation and eco-labelling has become more prevalent (Bush & Oosterveer, 2019). The largest eco-label, the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), now covers approximately 15 per cent of global fsh catch (Le Manach et al., 2020). As consumers have become more aware of overfshing as a problem, in large part due to campaigns by environmental NGOs, some brands and retailers have sought to enhance their reputation by aligning themselves with the sustainable seafood movement. Others have used market-based initiatives to protect their reputation by avoiding association with destructive fshing practices.

More recently, a dominant governance paradigm appears to be coalescing around the idea of a 'blue economy'. While there is much variation in how this term is used (Silver et al., 2015), the core proposal is to manage marine resources in a way that integrates ecological sustainability and economic proftability. As economic and political actors increasingly seek to access marine resources for ecologically sustainable uses that generate economic value, fsheries are becoming pressured both by governance regimes and by newer sectors. In some cases, fshing livelihoods are being pushed out, as coastal land and waters are appropriated for tourism, energy and conservation (Barbesgaard, 2018; Bavinck et al., 2017).

All too commonly, much fsheries governance struggles to be effective in protecting both the fsh stocks and the livelihoods that rely on them. Fishing itself is inherently diffcult to govern because the act of fshing takes place out at sea. The challenge is particularly acute in low-income contexts, where the state has few resources available for management, implementation and enforcement, and in many instances there are few viable alternative livelihoods (Barclay et al., 2019). Small-scale fsheries typically tend to be widely dispersed and fragmented across coastlines, and in practice tend to be informally governed at more local scales (Steenbergen et al., 2019). They are frequently missed in formal state statistics, and as a result are less visible in policy—a state of affairs several organisations and programmes are aiming to change (e.g., Too Big to Ignore, 2013).

Yet, there are also more fundamental, underlying reasons behind the challenges of fsheries governance that go well beyond the technical challenges of resources, implementation and enforcement in remote locations. Much fsheries governance proceeds from a standpoint informed by a narrow set of perspectives, where livelihoods are understood in terms of how much dollar value fsheries generate, and/or the effects of fsheries on fsh stocks and marine habitats. Financial revenue and the volume of landed catch become the two crucial metrics by which fsheries are assessed, and the role of fsheries management is usually framed in legislation as promoting viable industries and looking after fsh stocks.

The consequences of such perspectives are twofold. First, they narrow our understanding of what a fshing livelihood is: they are 'reductionist' in that they reduce or limit the scope of understanding a fshing livelihood to the acts of fshing and selling, and indeed usually only to the formal, easily visible elements of seafood trade. As such, they tend to gloss over or miss key aspects of fshing livelihoods. The political and economic contexts of fshing livelihoods (including their integration with other forms of economic activity), the historical processes leading up to their contemporary confgurations, and the diversity of social practices and identities associated with them are all central components of a fshing livelihood. As Johnson et al. (2005: 84) note, 'when looking at capture fsheries as a livelihood it becomes apparent that a strict division between the taking and landing of fsh and other aspects of life is hard to maintain'.

Second, and relatedly, viewing fshing livelihoods through a lens that emphasises gross economic value and environmental effects leads to the formation of particular forms of governance that do not address some of these important aspects of fshing livelihoods. For example, small-scale fsheries tend to be more associated with marginalised groups, such as women or poorer people. The livelihood functions of small-scale fsheries can, therefore, be characterised more effectively through the generation of 'welfare', in contrast or in addition to 'wealth' (Béné et al., 2010). In these contexts, policies that aim to promote the generation of wealth alone can cause signifcant negative social effects (Cohen et al., 2019). Beyond the ethical dilemmas of these negative social effects, there are also environmentally pragmatic consequences of pursuing governance visions that ignore fshing livelihood contexts. When policies do not attain broad popular support, they fail to attain legitimacy (Coulthard et al., 2011; Jentoft, 2000). Governance that is illegitimate can have poor compliance. By ignoring the wider aspects of fshing livelihoods, governance is less likely to be legitimate, and subsequently less likely to attain its objectives.

## Fisheries as <sup>a</sup> Social Process

In contrast to perspectives that emphasise gross economic value and environmental effects of fsheries, there is a long tradition of social science that views fsheries as a fundamentally social process. Historians, social anthropologists and others have shown the intricate links between fshing and societies (Binkley, 2002; Clark, 2017; Firth, 1966; Probyn, 2016), documenting cultural traditions related to fshing (Allison et al., 2020), customary and contemporary forms of marine tenure that regulate access to marine spaces (Acheson, 1988; Hviding, 1996), the social relations between different groups of people involved in fshing (Pálsson, 1994), and the non-economic factors that drive people to pursue fshing as a livelihood (Pollnac & Poggie, 2008). In recent decades, much fsheries social science has taken an explicitly applied approach, seeking to apply insights about human behaviour to the challenge of improving fsheries governance (Berkes et al., 2001; Kooiman et al., 2005; Kraan & Linke, 2020; McGoodwin, 1995). Organisations such as the Centre for Maritime Studies, FAO, WorldFish and the Too Big to Ignore research network have developed signifcant bodies of literature around small-scale fsheries (Jentoft, 2019), the theory and practice of interactive governance (Kooiman et al., 2005) and human rights-based approaches to fsheries (Allison et al., 2012). Many donor-funded fsheries projects in developing countries routinely include social science as part of their activities (e.g., Christie et al., 2005), and academic felds emerging from the environmental sciences (e.g., literature on social-ecological systems and resilience) now engage with questions traditionally addressed by social scientists, such as those relating to poverty and participation (e.g., Blythe et al., 2017). The increasing emphasis on interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary science has meant that the feld of 'marine social science' (#marsocsci) now incorporates a diverse set of perspectives.

Within this feld of scholarship, we focus on three specifc threads of literature that are particularly relevant for our discussion on fshing livelihoods: the sustainable livelihoods approach (SLA), the social wellbeing approach and political economy perspectives. The SLA conceived of a livelihood comprised of 'the capabilities, assets (including both material and social resources) and activities required for a means of living' (Chambers & Conway, 1992: 6). Subsequently highly infuential, in part because of its adoption by the United Kingdom's Department for International Development, livelihood assets were conceptualised as a 'pentagon' of capitals (natural, social, human, physical and fnancial). Among the key emphases of the SLA was a focus on diversifcation as a positive strategy to spread risk, and the SLA approach was subsequently used in the fsheries sector in diverse academic and policy contexts (Allison & Ellis, 2001; Allison & Horemans, 2006). While the SLA has subsequently been subject to critique for its relative neglect of politics and power (De Haan & Zoomers, 2005; Scoones, 2009), its emphasis on the material aspects of livelihoods (Carr, 2013) and on local-scale processes and structure (Carr, 2015), it remains a common approach in many fsheries governance interventions in developing countries (e.g., Apine et al., 2019).

Building on a diverse set of traditions in development studies and quality-of-life studies—including the SLA—the 'three-dimensional' or 3D social wellbeing approach emerged in fsheries as a way to understand fshing livelihoods more broadly than gross economic totals (Coulthard et al., 2011; Weeratunge et al., 2014). While 'objective' values (e.g., economic contributions) are still examined in this approach, attention is also paid to subjective values (e.g., job satisfaction) and relational values (e.g., relationships between different groups of people involved in the fshery). The goal is to assess a fshery not just in terms of economic value or environmental impact, but also in terms of a wider suite of values (Johnson et al., 2018). With this framing of fsheries, the governance question becomes one of how to design interventions that adequately capture the wider total of contributions that fsheries make (Song, 2018). Therefore, both the SLA and wellbeing approaches to understanding livelihoods take us a long way from understanding a fshing livelihood as the act of fsh harvesting alone.

In the fsheries sector, much work in the broad tradition of political economy has emerged that challenges conventional explanations of resource decline as the 'tragedy of the commons', referring instead to wider systemic factors such as patterns of capital accumulation (Campling et al., 2012; Longo et al., 2015; Mansfeld, 2004). However, as Belton (2016) notes, there remains considerable scope to bring together studies of social wellbeing and political economy. While studies of agrarian change that investigate the drivers and outcomes of livelihood change have long been prominent in journals such as the *Journal of Peasant Studies* and the *Journal of Agrarian Change*, less political economy attention has been paid to coastal spaces (Campling & Colás, 2018; Fabinyi et al., 2019).

## Our Approach

Focusing on the intersection between these approaches—livelihoods, wellbeing and political economy—our approach can broadly be seen as ftting in under the rubric of 'political ecology' (Perreault et al., 2015). This is a feld notable for its diversity of concepts and approaches, but there are several key aspects of political ecology that inform our approach.

First is an emphasis on multiple scales. While recognising that scale itself is a social construct (Neumann, 2009), a core tenet of early political ecology from the 1980s has been to emphasise that the factors driving human behaviour in relation to the environment are often located at regional or global scales (Blaikie & Brookfeld, 1987). This emphasis intersected with the long-overdue recognition in social anthropology that the social relations structuring everyday life frequently had as much or more to do with dynamic processes of global economic transformation over time, instead of what were typically depicted as static local cultures (Gupta & Ferguson, 1997; Wolf, 1983). Carr (2015: 336) notes that 'a political ecological approach to livelihoods analysis explains local livelihood decisions and their sustainability through locally specifc materializations of translocal economic, political, and environmental processes and structures'.

A second notable feature of political ecology from at least the 1990s has been to analyse how material and symbolic orders interact (Hornborg et al., 2013; Peet & Watts, 1996). Social identities, ideas and cultural values—such as the role of gender (Rocheleau et al., 1996), attitudes towards the environment (Agrawal, 2005), or the roles of dominant environmental narratives (Fairhead & Leach, 1996; Forsyth, 2014)—all strongly infuence human–environment relations. Relatedly, a third feature of much political ecology has been attention to the role of political actors, including the state, and political struggles over the environment (Robbins, 2012). From this perspective, conficts over access to and exclusion from environmental resources are not unusual or aberrant processes, but the norm when studying 'politicised environments' (Bryant & Bailey, 1997; Le Billon & Duffy, 2018).

This book adopts what we term as a *relational approach* to fshing livelihoods. While the concept of relationality is used in diverse ways, here we draw broadly on a philosophical tradition that emphasises the roles of process, experience and relations as fundamental categories (Dewey, 1929; Ingold, 2015, 2018b; Whitehead, 1929). As Ingold (2018a: 100, 101–102) describes it, this is a view that sees 'relations not just as derivative of society, but as the very fabric of social life. … In life, relations are not given in advance but have continually to be performed'. We use the term relational to emphasise that a livelihood is best understood as a set of activities operating in relationships with other processes and people over time, and that livelihoods are shaped by people's relational positions in society.

While closely related to the social wellbeing concept of relationality (see Johnson, 2018), we also draw explicitly on a political economy tradition of work on poverty. Specifcally, we draw on Mosse's (2010) conceptualisation of poverty as a consequence of two sets of social relationships—frst, historically developed economic and political relations, and second, social categorisation and identity (see also Harriss, 2009). While a 'fshing livelihood' is by no means always a life of poverty (Bavinck, 2014), and the concept of livelihood is quite different to the concept of poverty, we suggest that they are similar in that both can be effectively understood as centred on a set of social relationships that change over time, instead of as a discrete attribute of an individual or household.

In addition to the wider processes of political-economic change and the microsocial relations highlighted by Mosse, we suggest that a third key relationship a fshing livelihood has is with the specifc institutional arrangements that govern access to and exclusion from fsheries resources (Hall et al., 2011; Li, 2007). While these three sets of relationships overlap with each other, the aim is to combine what are broadly Marxian ideas about 'adverse incorporation' into the global economy (e.g., McCarthy, 2010), with broadly Weberian ideas about social exclusion (e.g., Hall et al., 2011) and critical accounts of governance (Li, 2007) in complementary ways (Mosse, 2010). Understanding a livelihood in terms of the social relationships and structures that sustain and reproduce it embeds the concept in processes of change. We view livelihoods as constituted through their relations with the wider political economy, the microsocial climate and the institutional context.

The Asia-Pacifc is an important site to study fshing livelihoods for several reasons. Asia alone provides 30.77 million out of the 38.98 million employed in fsheries worldwide (FAO, 2020). While the Pacifc is far less densely populated, it generates some of the most globally signifcant fsheries in the form of large-scale tuna fsheries. The area as a whole is host to the 'Coral Triangle', a region defned by the highest marine biodiversity in the world. While we draw on secondary literature where relevant, the book draws directly on our own research experience across several countries. Fabinyi has conducted long-term research on fshing and coastal livelihoods in the Philippines since 2005, especially in Palawan and Mindoro.3 He also has research experience on fshing livelihoods in Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Solomon Islands, and on seafood markets and consumption in China. Barclay started researching livelihoods in the tuna industry in Japan and the Solomon Islands in 1997, other Pacifc Island countries, including PNG since 2005, and Indonesia since 2016. She has also investigated fsheries and aquaculture livelihoods in Australia (in South Australia, New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland). Both of us rely primarily on qualitative research, at different times using semi-structured interviews, participant observation and historical analysis. Since we draw on selected case studies from the countries where we have worked, the book is not a comprehensive analysis of the entire Asia-Pacifc, but focuses largely on livelihoods in Island South-East Asia and the Pacifc (see Fig. 1.1). Another major omission is of inland

3Mindoro is composed of two provinces, Occidental and Oriental Mindoro, while Palawan is currently proposed to be split into three provinces: Palawan del Norte, Palawan Oriental and Palawan del Sur. In this book, Mindoro and Palawan are collectively referred to as the Western Philippines.

fshing livelihoods—an important topic deserving of greater levels of research and policy investment, particularly in the Asia-Pacifc (Cooke et al., 2016; Funge-Smith & Bennett, 2019).

The following chapters draw on selected case studies from our research to demonstrate a relational approach to understanding fshing livelihoods. Chapter 2 discusses how fshing livelihoods are shaped by wider processes of capitalist transformation, using cases of the Philippines and PNG. In Chap. 3 we examine how fshing livelihoods relate to social processes of access and exclusion, particularly status and gender. Chapter 4 discusses how different models and practices of governance can shape livelihoods, drawing on cases from Australia and Indonesia. Chapter 5 concludes with a discussion of how the approach taken in this book can be practically used to contribute to improved governance. There are many areas of overlap, and the distinctions between the subject matters of the chapters blur considerably in practice. Our overall goal is to highlight concrete examples of how fshing livelihoods relate to broader political-economic processes, social relationships and institutional contexts, and the implications of such a perspective for improving governance for sustainable and equitable fshing livelihoods.

## References


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# Responding to Global Change

**Abstract** This chapter focuses on the wider processes of politicaleconomic change that drive key characteristics of fshing livelihoods. Globalisation has dramatically expanded the scale and accelerated the pace of fsheries capture and trade, generating new opportunities and challenges for livelihoods and marine environments. Here we document some of the major characteristics of the history of fshing across the Asia-Pacifc, before focusing on case studies of the Philippines and PNG. We highlight three related features of globalisation that have infuenced fshing livelihoods and that continue to shape them today: migration, engagement with markets and new technologies, and interactions with other forms of economic activity, including those outside the fsheries sector.

**Keywords** Globalisation • Fish markets • Fishing technology • Papua New Guinea • Philippines

In this chapter we focus on the wider processes of political-economic change that drive key characteristics of fshing livelihoods. Along with other sectors of economic life, fsheries have been radically transformed through an interrelated set of processes commonly referred to by the shorthand term 'globalisation'. Globalisation has dramatically expanded the scale and accelerated the pace of fsheries capture and trade, generating new opportunities and challenges for livelihoods and marine environments.

While analyses of the relationships between globalisation and agrarian livelihoods are common (Akram-Lodhi & Kay, 2010; Bernstein, 2010), less frequent are examinations of the infuences of globalisation on fshing livelihoods. While not denying the capacity of human agency and choice that feeds into livelihood decisions (Ransan-Cooper, 2016), the livelihoods of fshers respond to regional and global forces that change over time. Whether it be crew on industrial fshing vessels (Minnegal et al., 2003; Pálsson & Durrenberger, 1990), or small-scale fshers accessing new markets, adopting new technologies or transitioning into different forms of production (e.g., aquaculture) (Belton & Thilsted, 2014; Béné et al., 2009; Platteau, 1984), the structural conditions of these economic activities are formed by processes of change that operate at much wider scales than the household or the local community.

Here we document some of the major characteristics of the history of fshing across the Asia-Pacifc, before focusing on case studies of the Philippines and PNG. We highlight three related features of globalisation that have infuenced fshing livelihoods and that continue to shape them today: migration, engagement with markets and new technologies, and interactions with other forms of economic activity, including those outside the fsheries sector.

## Fisheries and Globalisation

The term 'globalisation' has many interpretations. We adopt a perspective that views it as a process centred around capital accumulation. Harvey's concepts of the 'spatial fx' (1982) and of 'time–space compression' (1989) highlight the drive for capital accumulation, and the increasing power of communication and transport technologies. While this process arguably started with European capitalism and colonialism spreading out from the sixteenth century (Wallerstein, 2004), these processes have intensifed since the end of World War II. From this perspective, globalisation is a systemic force driven by capitalism.

A key theme in historical accounts of the globalisation of fsheries has been that of the 'frontier'—fsheries activities expanding and intensifying in response to new market demands from population growth and increasing wealth (Butcher, 2004). Moore's (2015) commodity frontier framework distinguishes between two phases of frontiers, and has been usefully applied to tuna fsheries (Campling, 2012). The initial phase of 'commodity widening' is based on geographic expansion, and 'commodity deepening' involves intensive development: 'frms dependent upon the appropriation of natural resources seek to continuously expand into new commodity frontiers, whether in terms of geographical extent or industrial intensity' (Baglioni & Campling, 2017: 2443). Fishing livelihoods have been progressively drawn into these dynamic forces of capital accumulation—moving towards new opportunities; using new technologies to target more types of marine resources, preserve them more effectively and transport them more easily; and accessing trade networks operating at greater scales.

Butcher (2004) and Christensen (2014) distinguish three key phases of development in the commercial fsheries of South-East Asia and the 'Indo-Pacifc', respectively. From the later part of the nineteenth century until the 1930s, the foundations for industrial fshing in South-East Asia were laid by European colonial powers bringing small island groups together into states, and establishing government control over coastal areas, reducing piracy, expanding transport networks and encouraging fshing investment (Butcher, 2004). In the early twentieth century Japanese feets expanded industrial fshing into South-East Asia, and built smoking and canning factories (Butcher, 2004; H. Chen 2008a; T.Y. Chen 2008b; Fujinami, 1987). After World War II, fsheries activities in South-East Asia boomed in what was termed 'the great fsh race' (Butcher, 2004) or the 'great acceleration' (Christensen, 2014). State-supported fsheries expanded rapidly, and in the 1950s pre-war Japanese interests also reestablished industrial fshing enterprises in South-East Asia (Morgan & Staples, 2006). Subsequently, from the late 1970s, the frontier began to 'close', as fsh catches began to stagnate.

As Campling and Havice (2018) note, national seafood production systems and state-based regulatory regimes have been a crucial element of this process. In the Asia-Pacifc, one of the key factors at play has been the rise of different distant water feets seeking catches around the globe. Fishing states have supported their feets to fsh in distant waters by various means, including subsidies for vessels, fuel and fsheries access fees. For their part, coastal states have shaped fshing patterns by excluding distant water feets from their EEZs in favour of domestic feets, as in the case of the Maldives. Kiribati and Vanuatu are examples of a different route, inviting distant water feets to fsh in their EEZs in exchange for fees. A third model is to invite distant water fshing companies to invest in domestic fshing and/or processing capacity, like PNG and Solomon Islands (Barclay & Cartwright, 2008). The Japanese and US industrial tuna feets were the frst in the Pacifc, although, by the start of the 'great acceleration' both were waning somewhat, in part due to their own rising production costs compared to competitor feets. Taiwanese and Korean feets became important during the heyday expansion of the 1970s and 1980s. In the 2000s the Filipino tuna feet became a regional player, and the Chinese feet started its steady increase (Barclay, 2014).

As countries became exposed to fshing practices from other countries, knowledge diffused and technology developed. Harvesting practices adopted new technologies to increase their catch, such as nylon fbres for nets and engines for boats. For example, the 'muro-ami' fshing technique was introduced to the Philippines by Japan, and was adopted by many vessels in the Philippines until its eventual banning in 1986. Blast fshing became popular after World War II, when access to explosives became common. Processing and preservation technologies, such as canning and freezing, reduced the perishability of fsh, and the expansion of transportation networks (e.g., airfreight) all contributed to greater capacity to store and distribute fsh catch. The mixing of knowledge and technology is also closely linked to the increase of movement and people, as people moved to access the opportunities provided by fshing livelihoods in more productive places (Eder, 2008). Many industrial fsheries in the Asia-Pacifc came to be crewed by foreign labour.

Specifc consumer markets have also emerged as crucial drivers of the growth in fsheries. Much seafood exportation has been from developing to developed countries, especially Japan, the EU and the US (Swartz et al., 2010). Consumer preferences, such as for tuna in Japan, have shaped what sorts of fsh are caught and how they are processed, and consumer markets increasingly shape the regulatory conditions under which fsh are caught through trade measures. The growth of China as a wealthy consumer market has had signifcant effects on the nature of fshing livelihoods in the Asia-Pacifc. While many of the products demanded by the Chinese market are not new, increasing wealth in China since the opening up of the economy in the 1980s has greatly increased demand. Markets for sea cucumbers, shark fn, live reef food fsh and fsh maw—products highly valued in Chinese cuisine for perceived health benefts or associations with high status—have all expanded greatly since this period (Purcell et al., 2013; Sadovy de Mitcheson et al., 2013; Sadovy de Mitcheson et al., 2019; Scales et al., 2006). This has led analysts to conceptualise the nature of this form of seafood production and trade as 'contagious exploitation' (Eriksson et al., 2015), or as 'roving bandits' (Scales et al., 2006). More recently, COVID-19 is reshaping the nature of seafood markets and of trade more generally (Robins et al., 2020).

The following sections explore how these global-scale processes have come to concretely shape fshing livelihoods, focusing on three key aspects of globalisation: migration, new technologies and markets, and changing forms of interaction with non-fsheries activities.

## The Western Philippines

A particular form of movement in the Philippines since the late nineteenth century has been individuals and families leaving locations characterised by social confict, high population densities and poverty, towards 'frontier' locations characterised by lower population densities and new livelihood opportunities. At different points in time, Mindanao, Mindoro and Palawan served as such frontier settlement locations.

In Mindoro, Indigenous Mangyan groups were once the majority population, but this changed with settlement by migrants during the early twentieth century. They arrived from varied regions of the Philippines (e.g., Luzon, the Visayan Islands) in response to US colonial encouragement of agricultural production and exports, and investments in infrastructure (Helbling & Schult, 1997; Schult, 1991). Migrants settled heavily in the coastal and agriculturally productive lowlands of the island, while Mangyan groups became marginalised upland. Land conficts soon ensued (Helbling & Schult, 1997). Migrants outnumbered the Mangyan by 1920 (1997) and came to dominate the lowlands and coasts, and consequently the fshing livelihoods.

In Palawan, Indigenous groups occupied different parts of the province prior to settlement by migrants—Tagbanua in the North, Batak and Palawan in the central part of the island, and Molbog in the South. From the late nineteenth century, migration from the nearby islands of Cuyo and Agutaya increased. Long characterised as the 'last frontier of the Philippines', migration to Palawan increased after the settlement of Mindoro and Mindanao, and particularly so after World War II. While migrants arrived from diverse locations, many came from the Visayan group of islands (Eder & Fernandez, 1996).

Compared to Mindoro the settlement of Palawan was less driven by specifc projects, and Palawan instead served as a 'land of opportunity' for farming and fshing in particular. For example, fshers would often travel to Palawan on a seasonal or intermittent basis, sometimes forming social relationships with local groups already present (Ushijima & Zayas, 1994). After some time of these sojourns, the household might relocate, and then other kin and neighbours would follow (Seki, 2004). The time line of migration to Palawan—Cuyonon initially, followed by Visayan—meant that many of the best farmlands were obtained by Cuyonon households, and more recent Visayan migrants settled along the coast (Eder, 2003). In the south of Palawan, refugees from the civil confict in the Sulu Archipelago settled from the 1970s.

While the Western Philippines was the source of a signifcant proportion of the country's entire landed catch from the 1970s (Butcher, 2004), the vast majority of the vessels were based in Manila and elsewhere in the Philippines, contributing little to the local economy. Although since 1991 the Local Government Code has prohibited the entry of large-scale fshing vessels1 within 15 km of the shoreline, the waters around Mindoro and Palawan remain favoured fshing grounds for many externally based largescale vessels. Over time, large-scale fsheries based in these locations also emerged. For example, in the 1980s Coron in Northern Palawan became host to a high number of lift net boats, targeting anchovies. Other commercial fshing boats adapted gears and techniques to fsh for fusiliers with baited hook and line; mixed reef fsh with weighted lines with lures; dynamite (illegal); spearfshing using air compressors for diving; variants of 'baby' purse seines and trawlers; and the notorious muro-ami fshery, notable for its high degree of ecological destructiveness and use of child labour. Due to the lack of readily available ice, processing and preserving fsh through drying was very common. The fsh landed from these vessels served major provincial markets throughout the country, and especially that of Manila, while some were exported.

Small-scale fshers in the Philippines have long been selling their catch commercially. As Firth (1966) and Spoehr (1984) noted, because fsh alone does not provide an adequate source of food, full-time fshers (or specialised fshing communities) in particular needed to sell some of their catch to obtain other foods. Fish was bartered for rice, vegetables or other

<sup>1</sup>Large-scale fsheries in the Philippines are labelled as 'commercial fshing', defned as > 3 gross tonnes.

food, or sold at local markets for cash, or dried and sold to itinerant buyers and vessels that collected fsh products. With the introduction of motorised boats, and the increased availability of ice and roads, the capacity of smallscale fshers to access new markets, such as the municipal towns, increased.

With the spread of migrants came the spread of knowledge about fshing techniques—migrants from the Visayan region are particularly renowned for their knowledge of different types of fshing gears and techniques. Small-scale fshers in contemporary times in the Western Philippines are notable for the extraordinary diversity of gears and techniques used to obtain marine resources (see Fig. 2.1). Simple hook and line, originally using vine or other natural fbres, was replaced with nylon, and different techniques for hooking fsh include the use of bait (e.g., shrimp) and the use of lures (e.g., foil, plastic, feathers). Longlines, utilising many largersized hooks to a greater depth, are used to catch larger fsh and sharks. Variants of net fshing including bottom-set, foating and drift gillnets are common, sometimes with the use of plungers to scare the fsh into the net. Traps made of bamboo or other wood for fsh and crustaceans are

**Fig. 2.1** Fishers catching big-eye scad to use as baitfsh for tuna in Puerto, Philippines. (Photo credit: Katherine Jack)

common, as are specifcally designed hooks (squid jigs) used to catch squid. Diving with spear guns is common in the shallows, gleaning occurs along shorelines and beach seines are used in some locations. Many of the fsh caught are locally processed and sold in local or regional markets, or in larger destinations such as Manila.

China is a particularly lucrative market for fshers in the Western Philippines from which demand has intensifed in recent decades. Since the opening up of China's economy from 1978, incomes in China increased, as did demand for specifc marine products, such as dried sea cucumbers, live reef food fsh, shark fn and fsh maw. The high prices paid for these marine products served as a catalyst for fshers throughout the Philippines to focus on them. The exploitation of sea cucumbers and live fsh in Western Philippines highlights the dual phases of commodity frontiers, encompassing both commodity 'widening' with geographic expansion, and 'deepening' with the use of advanced technologies.

More than 30 types of sea cucumbers are exploited in the waters of the Philippines (Jontila et al., 2018). Once the sea cucumbers are caught they are dried and processed and sold through various market channels to eventually arrive in their destination markets, of which China is the largest. Consumption of sea cucumbers has been popular for centuries in China as a status and health food, and demand has spiked since the 1980s and 1990s (Eriksson et al., 2015). The most expensive tropical sea cucumbers are sandfsh (*Holothuria scabra*), white teatfsh (*Holothuria fuscogilva*), and black teatfsh (*Holothuria whitmaei*), with prices reaching well over US\$100 per kilogram in Chinese markets (Brown et al., 2010; Purcell et al., 2018). In their dried form (bêche-de-mer), sea cucumbers are shelf stable for weeks or months, so have offered a rare opportunity for remote coastal areas characterised by a lack of easy market access (Barclay et al., 2016).

Akamine's (2001) study of sea cucumber exploitation in Southern Palawan shows how fshing livelihoods responded to these market drivers. In the late 1970s, sea cucumbers were caught by skin divers, on relatively short trips closer to shore. While the use of air compressors was introduced around this time (i.e., using an air compressor on a boat and diving with a hose to breathe), many accidents occurred, and so this technology did not become popular until the arrival of more experienced fshers from the Visayan group of islands in the late 1980s. From around this time, vessels started to travel further into the South China Sea, diving deeper and targeting more types of species that became progressively more commercially valuable. Women, who previously participated in gleaning and inshore fshing for sea cucumbers, did not participate in these trips. From the 1990s, the depths to which divers would go to fnd sea cucumbers increased (up to 60 metres), and the use of depth sounders ('fshfnders') was also introduced. However, by the late 2000s, the sea cucumber fshery in Palawan (Brown et al., 2010) and in the Philippines more generally (Choo, 2008) had declined signifcantly. Overharvesting meant that the trade was characterised by a higher proportion of smaller sea cucumbers and of lower-valued species (Akamine, 2005; Brown et al., 2010), and local extirpations occurred. In Southern Palawan, while sea cucumbers continue to be harvested as a supplemental livelihood activity (Fabinyi et al., 2012), many fshers turned instead to another lucrative marine product: live reef fsh.

Live reef fsh have long served as an important component of seafood banquets in China, and, as with sea cucumbers, their demand has dramatically increased as wealth levels in the Chinese economy have grown since the 1980s. Particularly highly valued reef fsh in these banquets include Napoleon wrasse (*Cheilinus undulatus*), humpback grouper (*Cromileptes altivelis*) and leopard coral grouper (*Plectropomus leopardus*). The fsh are caught live and kept alive until they reach a restaurant. The vast majority of higher-valued reef fsh end up in China. Exploitation of live reef fsh expanded geographically over time, from waters near Hong Kong to the wider Indo-Pacifc (Scales et al., 2006), including the Western Philippines. In Palawan, which supplies most of the country's live fsh exports (Padilla et al., 2003), the live fsh industry began in Coron in the late 1980s, and from there the trade spread throughout the municipalities of Palawan, all the way down to Balabac in the extreme South. While Coron remained an important trading hub, fewer fsh came to be sourced from the waters around Coron due to overexploitation, and municipalities further south formed the epicentre of this trade in Palawan. While many attempts have been made to govern the trade in a more environmentally sustainable way in Palawan and elsewhere, institutions for sustainability have found it diffcult to compete against the economic pressures of this lucrative fshery (Fabinyi & Dalabajan, 2011; Sadovy de Mitcheson et al., 2013).

In many instances, the expansion of the live reef fsh fshery has been fnanced with capital originating from further up the commodity chain. Fishers are fnanced for their fshing trips (many of which last several days, or even beyond a week) by buyers based in the municipal towns. In many cases, these buyers are agents of exporters based in Manila, who in turn have fnancial relationships with importers based in Hong Kong. In the south of Palawan, many traders are fnanced by ethnic Chinese buyers (*towkays*) based in Sabah, Malaysia.

The live reef fsh fshery is notable for its high dependence on particular technologies. While many fshers use weighted hooks with lures to catch live fsh, the use of cyanide and air compressors is also common. Fishers dive deep with the assistance of a compressor and squirt a solution of cyanide into reefs to stun and catch the fsh. If a fsh is brought up too quickly from deep water, the swim bladder will rupture, killing it, and so fshers have to be skilled in puncturing the swim bladder with a hypodermic needle, obtained from local health clinics. Once the fsh are brought to the surface, they are kept alive in specially designed aquariums in the vessels that allow fresh water to continuously fow through. If a fsh is below optimal market size, it is placed in a grow-out cage for weeks or even months before being sold. Since the leopard coral groupers lose their bright red colour when staying for long periods of time in shallow water, many of these cages are located tens of metres below the surface. Fishers dive to feed them, using air compressors for breathing. After the fsh are sold to a buyer's aquarium, the fsh are often fed antibiotics and tranquilisers to reduce their mortality and stress during transport. The fsh are then transported in oxygenated bags to the local airport, where they are fown to Manila, and subsequently transferred to a commercial fight to Hong Kong. The expansion of this trade in Palawan has, therefore, been highly dependent on the capital originating from buyers at higher levels of the commodity chain, and on the expansion of the physical infrastructure (roads, airports) and use of technologies (cyanide, needles, air compressors, medicines) required to catch and transport these fsh.

Not only has the practice of fshing activities changed over time, as these examples of sea cucumbers and live fsh show, but also the signifcance of fshing within the broader spectrum of activities that constitute household livelihoods in the coastal Philippines is dynamic. While specialist fshing communities that rely almost entirely on fshing as a livelihood remain common in the Philippines (Spoehr, 1984), especially in contexts where there are few other viable livelihood options, there are also many instances in which fshing is combined with other sources of income, such as farming, livestock raising, small household enterprises such as mixedgoods stores, and transport work (Eder, 2003). In these instances, fshing can be combined in a highly fexible manner, taken up in a seasonal, parttime or supplemental fashion. Fishers also typically practise multiple types of fshing activity at different times of the day, month or year.

As fshing activities in general become increasingly diffcult in parts of the Western Philippines due to lower catches and increased pressure from regulations (e.g., MPAs), residents in some cases are turning to additional or alternative sources of income. For example, the growth of aquaculture in many regions of the Philippines has generated opportunities for fshers. In the Western Philippines the government has done much to stimulate seaweed production through support programmes. While this activity contributes to livelihood portfolios, in many cases as a supplemental livelihood activity, without substantial investments it rarely generates the sorts of profts found in the sea cucumber and live reef food fsheries. In parts of coastal Mindoro, which has had a longer history of settlement and economic diversifcation than Palawan, remittances from family members working overseas also now form a considerable proportion of household incomes.

In particular, fshing livelihoods in the Western Philippines have been adjusting to the rapid rise in tourism. Promoted heavily by governments in the Philippines at all levels, tourism is widely viewed as an economic activity that can generate economic benefts and to do so in a more environmentally sustainable manner than many fsheries. Not every community in Western Palawan is regularly frequented by tourists, and a range of positive and negative effects of coastal tourism has been identifed (Fabinyi, 2020). However, the growth in recent years has been enough to drive many previous full-time fshers into livelihoods based instead on tourism (e.g., guesthouse accommodation, converting fshing boats into 'beachhopping' or dive boats, guiding, etc.), or mixing tourism and fshing livelihood activities (e.g., supplying restaurants with seafood). The growth in related infrastructure (airports, roads, buildings) has also drawn people to work in construction and other wage labour jobs. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic effectively shut down the tourism industry in Western Philippines, so many people again turned to fshing as their main livelihood.

## Papua New Guinea

In contrast to the Philippines, PNG is a country with a much lower population density. According to the World Bank, in 2019 the population of the Philippines was around 108 million for 300,000 km2, whereas the PNG population was around 8.7 million for 463,000 km2. In general there are much lower levels of industrialisation in PNG, and subsistence horticulture remains the most important livelihood. Fishing livelihoods are in general much less diverse, with most fshing being for home consumption or sale in local markets, resulting in signifcantly less fshing pressure on the marine environment. Yet, both during colonial times and more recently, coastal zones of PNG have also been rapidly drawn into trading networks at multiple scales, and these trade networks and market demands and opportunities exercise signifcant infuence over the sorts of fshing livelihoods available to coastal residents.

In pre-colonial times, internal migration around PNG was relatively limited in geographic extent. After European contact and settlement, there was a reduction of movement in response to violence and warfare, but over time more people began to migrate to government and mission stations, and urban centres (May & Skeldon, 1977). This rural-to-urban migration has meant that in some coastal communities where fshing is a major livelihood, remittances from urban centres (e.g., Port Moresby) are signifcant—although this is variable (Carrier, 1981; Hayes, 1993; Vieira et al., 2017). In recent decades, in addition to well-established forms of rural-to-urban migration, internal migration has often been characterised by people moving towards large-scale resource extraction projects such as mines (Bainton, 2017) or agricultural plantations (Curry & Koczberski, 1998). Unlike in the Philippines, fshing is rarely the main motivation for migration in coastal villages. In a study of 14 coastal villages across PNG, not one migrant respondent nominated fshing as their reason for migration, most nominating other employment opportunities and marriage as their reasons (Cinner, 2009). However, thousands of internal migrants living in settlements around the cities of Madang and Lae work in the tuna industries based around those cities (Barclay, 2012).

Nevertheless, the ways in which migration patterns affect livelihoods and resource use in coastal communities remain highly important, largely due to the social relationships between migrants and non-migrants. In terrestrial parts of PNG, Filer (1997) has documented the emergence of an 'ideology of landownership', where the growth of resource extraction projects from the 1980s led to heightened consciousness of and identifcation with customary landownership. This has led, for example, to contestations and disputes over who is a rightful landowner, to whom one has social obligations, and who should, therefore, beneft from the activities of mines (Bainton, 2009).

Fishing and marine tenure, similar to terrestrial sectors, have also been subject to disputes about rightful ownership (e.g., Kinch, 2020; see also Foale & Macintyre, 2000 for Solomon Islands). Central to these disputes are ideas about who holds customary rights. In his study of coastal communities across PNG, Cinner (2009) noted that migrants were in many cases excluded from access to marine resources, and were less involved in decision-making. Therefore, while coastal fsheries are not a pull factor for migration to coastal areas in PNG, patterns of migration do inform who is able to fsh as a livelihood. As Connell and Lutkehaus (2017: 92) note in their study of resettlement projects in coastal PNG, 'social relationships are written in the ground and editing or removing the writing is almost impossible, establishing a geometry of power that absolutely marginalises potential settlers'.

Central to the increasing emphasis on access rights to marine resources has been engagement with markets. Exchange practices in coastal zones of PNG have been a crucial part of life from pre-colonial times (Malinowski, 1922). With the emergence of marketplaces in urban areas during the colonial period (Busse & Sharp, 2019), fsh have been sold for cash income. In a study of six sites in coastal PNG, Cinner and McClanahan (2006: 78) found that 'more than half of the caught fsh were bartered or sold'. Similarly, in a study from Madang Province, Havice and Reed (2012: 424) note that fsh catch is transitioning from consumption to selling in markets for cash, while in Manus, Lau et al. (2020) found that selling fsh in the market was the preferred use for fsh, over bartering, sharing or eating. Most urban areas and many coastal rural areas in PNG have marketplaces that sell diverse species of fsh caught from a range of gears, raw and cooked (Busse & Sharp, 2019; Cinner & McClanahan, 2006). Specifc technologies have emerged together with the expansion of domestic markets that have also increased the capacity of people to fsh further distances, use new techniques for catching fsh and to access further markets. These include the use of outboard motors, fbreglass boats, synthetic lines, metal hooks, compressors for diving, ice and ice chests and fsh aggregating devices.

In addition to the development of catching fsh for local marketplaces, a variety of export fsheries has emerged in PNG, including tuna (Barclay & Cartwright, 2008; Havice & Reed, 2012), aquarium fsh (Máñez et al., 2014), live reef food fsh (Hamilton & Matawai, 2006) and dried sea products. In coastal areas, bêche-de-mer and other dried products such as shark fn have been traded to South-East Asia since the 1800s, but became a signifcant industry in PNG from the early 1990s, as demand for these products in China boomed (Barclay et al., 2019; Kinch, 2020). Sea cucumbers are harvested usually by groups, dried and processed locally, and then transported to provincial capitals for trade onwards (see Fig. 2.2). In the

**Fig. 2.2** Fisher holding freshly caught sea cucumbers. (Photo credit: Arselene Uyami-Bitara)

1990s the bulk of the trade went to Singapore and Malaysia, but from the mid-2000s Hong Kong and China became the main destinations.

In many coastal parts of Milne Bay Province, as with other coastal areas in PNG, sales of bêche-de-mer became the most important source of cash income, almost exclusively in some places (Foale, 2005; Kinch, 2020). The strong demand for bêche-de-mer translated into high prices that dwarfed other income-generating opportunities, so fshing livelihoods became largely focused on this one commodity. While this increase in cash income led to benefts for many families, including basic necessities such as food, it also generated social challenges. As much of the diving for sea cucumbers was done by physically capable young men, they subsequently ended up controlling much of the cash, with tensions among younger and older men (Rasmussen, 2015), and between men and women (Barclay et al., 2016; Barclay et al., 2019). The rapid increase in the value of marine resources also led to protracted disputes among groups over access to fshing grounds (Foale, 2005; Kinch, 2020).

The consequences of this intensifed effort were that from the mid-2000s sea cucumber stocks declined precipitously. As in the Philippines, PNG fshers shifted their attention from higher-value species to lower-value species, meaning they had to take even greater amounts to maintain incomes (Barclay et al., 2019). In 2009, a moratorium was instituted to ban the sale and trade of bêche-de-mer.2 With the sudden cessation of income from sea cucumber, fshers were forced to shift into other livelihood activities. The amount of cash income derived by many coastal communities declined signifcantly (Barclay et al., 2019; Vieira et al., 2017).

While livelihood activities have always been mixed in coastal PNG, subsistence gardening remains a core component of most coastal livelihood portfolios. For example, sweet potatoes, bananas and taro are grown by 99 per cent, 96 per cent and 95 per cent of the PNG population, respectively (Bourke & Allen, 2009: 195). In coastal areas such as Milne Bay, while some income-generating opportunities remained after the bêche-de-mer ban was imposed, such as in copra plantations, overall, livelihoods became focused again on gardening. However, in some places gardening productivity was reduced by years of neglect, as people had focused on bêche-demer fshing (Barclay et al., 2016: 39). Although shark fn and trochus shell remain relatively important as cash-earning commodities in Milne Bay (Vieira et al., 2017), the fshing component of livelihoods has reverted to being more of a supplemental activity generating food and some cash income. Thus, as climate change effects increase (Connell & Lutkehaus, 2017) and the stocks of vulnerable, high-value species such as sharks and sea cucumbers decline, fshing livelihoods in PNG will continue to evolve in relation to the opportunities afforded by migration and other landbased livelihood activities, in particular farming.

## Conclusion

While fshing livelihoods have been practised for millennia, they are not static. Even in economically remote parts of the Asia-Pacifc, fshers have responded to market demands from nearby and beyond. These market demands shape what kinds of fsh are targeted, what technologies are used in the catch, processing and distribution of fsh, and how fshing activities relate to other livelihood activities, many of which are similarly shaped by other market demands. In many cases, these market demands and

<sup>2</sup>This moratorium was lifted in 2017.

opportunities are also a major factor behind where people choose to live. Ultimately, changing markets and population densities strongly affect the status of fsheries and the conditions for their sustainability (Cinner et al., 2013).

The interactions between fshing livelihoods and these broader global forces are mediated by very different contexts in PNG and Philippines. Cultures (Chap. 3) and governance (Chap. 4) are very different in these countries, and the Philippines has a signifcantly greater degree of economic integration with local and international markets, and a much larger, more densely distributed population than PNG. Yet, despite these different contexts, both countries have experienced increases in the geographic scale and the technological intensity of fshing activities—commodity 'widening' and 'deepening' (Moore, 2015). Taking into consideration historical trajectories and market drivers, we can see how fshing livelihoods are infuenced not only by individual or household decision-making, or by local or national governance structures, but also by wider, systemic forces of global economic transformation.

In many cases, these wider forces of global capitalism and development have favoured fshing activities to the point that they have become biologically unsustainable. This has fow-on effects for fshers who have to adapt to target other fsh, or adopt new livelihood activities beyond capture fsheries alone. The extent to which fshing livelihoods integrate, compete with or are ultimately surpassed by newer forms of coastal livelihoods such as tourism and aquaculture will be a major part of fshing livelihoods in the future.

For fsheries managers and policymakers, understanding the historical trajectories of fshing livelihoods, how they have changed and adapted over time, and how they are integrated with the wider economy provides important context on the external drivers of fshing activity and how fshers are likely to behave. For example, the relationship of fshing livelihoods to economic activities in other sectors is important when trying to generate 'alternative' livelihoods and encourage fshers to exit from the fshery, or when implementing regulations that rely on some degree of reduced fshing effort (Barclay et al., 2019). While economic and market-based approaches to fsheries governance attempt to work with individual markets, this approach can potentially conceal the wider systemic forces at play—the logics of commodity widening and deepening that ultimately drive further exploitation.

## References


Bernstein, H. (2010). *Class dynamics of agrarian change* (Vol. 1). Kumarian Press.


**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made.

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# Fishing Livelihoods and Social Diversity

**Abstract** This chapter shifts scale from Chap. 2 to focus on the local context and analyse the everyday sets of social relationships that frame the lives of those engaged in fshing livelihoods. The broad structural forces of migration, technology and markets along with the wider economy all intersect with local sets of social structures to shape the conditions in which fshing livelihoods operate. Here we present two examples of how different forms of social differentiation interact with fshing livelihoods. In the Western Philippines, class and status intersect with cultural values to generate power relations and hierarchies in different roles associated with fshing livelihoods. In Pacifc Island countries, gender norms structure the different types of fshing activities in which men and women are involved.

**Keywords** Class • Status • Gender • Philippines • Oceania • Value chain

This chapter shifts scale from Chap. 2 to focus on the local context and analyse the everyday sets of social relationships that frame the lives of those engaged in fshing livelihoods. The broad structural forces of migration, technology and markets along with the wider economy all intersect with local sets of social structures to shape the conditions in which fshing livelihoods operate. Understanding how these forms of social relationships such as class, gender and ethnicity—operate in relation to fshing livelihoods matters, because it shows how both fshing livelihoods and governance projects to manage these livelihoods are socially differentiated.

Much policy-oriented literature and practice in fsheries takes as relatively unproblematic starting points the ideas of a 'community' and a 'fsher'. Yet, an individual is far more than a 'fsher' whose sole priority is to catch fsh, and the idea of a 'fshing community' disguises a range of social cleavages, hierarchies and identities within groups. Different people will have different levels of engagement in fshing, different types of roles within fshing, and different expectations and understandings about fshing—all of which affect how we understand what their particular version of a fshing livelihood is, and how governors seek to manage it. For example, dominant narratives about fshers and poverty in developing countries (e.g., 'fshers are poor because they fsh'; Béné, 2003) can lead to governance interventions that ignore the wider context of vulnerability in which fshers may live and that they prioritise (e.g., lack of access to health care, lack of land tenure or inequalities among different social groups) (Béné & Friend, 2011; Fabinyi et al., 2015; Mills et al., 2011). Without careful attention to social differentiation, new governance institutions for sustainability are liable to get 'sucked up' into these existing patterns of inequality across class, gender, ethnic and other lines (Eder, 2005).

Many studies of social differentiation take the concept of class as their starting point. Early literature in political ecology, and much literature in discussions of agrarian change, uses the concept of class as a key marker of social differentiation, analysing the diverse ways in which groups of people engage with markets and relate to the means of production (e.g., as worker or owner). As Bernstein (2010: 22) summarises, such an approach is largely informed by asking basic questions on resource use, ownership and distribution.1

In the large-scale or industrial fsheries sector, there are signifcant class distinctions between boat owners and crew, refected in systems of proft sharing (McCall Howard, 2012). However, in many small-scale fsheries, distinctions between owners and crew are frequently much less distinct and can be thought of instead as a form of 'petty commodity production', where owners occupy dual roles of both capital and labour (Russell & Poopetch, 1990). Owners often work on their own vessels, employ crew through kin networks and have more egalitarian proft-sharing systems. In

<sup>1</sup> Specifcally, 'Who owns what? Who does what? Who gets what? What do they do with it?'

many other types of small-scale fsheries, there is no paid crew at all (i.e., it may just be a fsher, or a fsher with a family member), and the catch may be only partially marketed or used entirely for consumption. There are also often sharp class distinctions along the value chain, from producer to trader to consumer.

Beyond hierarchical categorisations of class, income and wealth, there are other distinctions between different types of fshers. For example, younger fshers, who in some cases are undertaking illegal fshing practices (Fabinyi, 2012; Lowe, 2002), may have different sets of economic goals compared to older fshers. Full-time fshers who rely on fshing as a sole source of income have different perceptions about fshing compared to part-time or seasonal fshers. The extraordinary diversity of gears and techniques mentioned in Chap. 2 means that new forms of governance, such as MPAs, have highly differentiated effects for different types of fshers (Eder, 2005).

Yet, livelihood roles are not the only factors underlying social differentiation (Hornborg et al., 2013).2 As political ecologists shifted from a primary focus on the forces of capitalism, they engaged with other ways of categorising social differentiation, including gender (Rocheleau et al., 1996), culture and ethnicity (Peet & Watts, 1996). In line with developments in social anthropology, this approach foregrounded the roles of meaning, identity and interpretation over a 'materialist' emphasis on 'protein and proft' (Geertz, 1973; Sahlins, 1978). Individuals have multiple identities that can shift over time and according to circumstance, or can intersect. Importantly, forms of social differentiation are not necessarily 'natural', but have elements of social construction and can be used in strategic ways (Dressler & Turner, 2008; Li, 2000). Ultimately, these markers of difference serve as crucial determinants of access to or exclusion from resources at the local level (Hall et al., 2011; Ribot & Peluso, 2003).

In many cases forms of social differentiation can map on to dominant or subordinate roles within fshing livelihoods or fsheries value chains. For example, women tend to be more closely associated with near-shore fshing and gleaning as well as onshore roles such as processing and trading (Weeratunge et al., 2010). In South-East Asia, the ethnic Sama-Bajau tend to follow small-scale fshing livelihoods (Stacey et al., 2018), while in

<sup>2</sup>As Hornborg et al. (2013: 2) note, 'an attribution of decisive signifcance to material parameters in reproducing power structures should not imply down-playing the role of socio-cultural categories in organizing such structures'.

South Asia different castes are associated with particular occupations, including fshing (Coulthard, 2008).

Here we present two examples of how different forms of social differentiation interact with fshing livelihoods. In the Western Philippines, class and status intersect with cultural values to generate power relations and hierarchies in different roles associated with fshing livelihoods. In Pacifc Island countries, gender norms structure the different types of fshing activities in which men and women are involved.

## Class and Status in Western Philippines Fishing Communities

Much social science of the political and economic development of the Philippines has highlighted relations of power and hierarchy (Kerkvliet, 1990; Sidel, 1999). In particular, inland agrarian regions, such as the sugar industry of Negros Island, or the rice-growing regions of Central Luzon, were characterised by sharp distinctions in assets and income between landowners and tenants, subsequently serving as the site of ongoing struggles over land reform. Compared to these agrarian regions, it can be more complex to characterise the forms of social differentiation in coastal communities (Eder, 2008). Yet, here too, economic roles and social identities interact to produce social institutions that condition forms of access and exclusion.

The classic division between the owner of the means of production and the wage labourer is refected in various ways in coastal communities in the Western Philippines. In large-scale fshing vessels, owners of the vessels are typically located in urban spaces (e.g., municipal towns, provincial capital cities), and in many cases are owned by frms that may own several vessels. In these large-scale fsheries (e.g., lift nets, baby purse seines, trawlers) the distinction between boat owners and boat crew is, therefore, quite distinct, with the owners hiring the captain and crew. However, in rural areas of the Western Philippines where many small-scale fshers operate, divisions between people based on their relationship to the means of production can be less obvious. In coastal communities there are typically many diverse modes of fshing, using different gears to target different marine resources at different locations, at different times of the day, month and year, and individuals typically move across several fsheries at any one time.

Many individuals or households straddle the distinctions between labour and capital as 'petty commodity producers'. For example, a fsher may own a motorised boat and work on it independently while employing other people as crew. In these circumstances, crews are often recruited through kin and/or neighbour networks, and the distribution of profts is frequently through a share system. In this system of proft sharing, shares may be allocated for the owner of the vessel and/or gear, and then distributed to crew members based on either total or individual catch. Some of the common types of small-scale fsheries operating in municipal waters are based on small, motorised boats with around two–four crew, which use gillnets to catch small pelagic fsh or seagrass-dwelling species such as rabbitfsh (*Siganidae*), or use hook and line to target live reef fsh (see Fig. 3.1). Some vessels operate a hybrid system between the small-scale, petty commodity mode of production and that used by industrial ventures. For example, vessels fshing for fusiliers, sardines or mixed reef fsh may have more than 20 crew and go out for two or more weeks at a time, but the owner works on board as the captain and recruits crew through kin networks (Fabinyi, 2012).

Owners of motorised boats tend to be more visibly well-off than those who do not own a vessel. For those without capital in the form of a fshing vessel or gear, all of their fshing income must derive directly from how much they catch, and they tend to be among the poorest in any rural coastal community. Their housing is often made of temporary bush materials (*nipa*), and many have no access to electricity and go through periods of food insecurity (Fabinyi et al., 2017).

Frequently, the distinctions between boat owners and those without boats overlap with other forms of differentiation. Indigenous groups, such as the Mangyan in Mindoro and Tagbanua in Northern Palawan, tend to live inland or to participate in fsheries as hired crew (Dressler & Fabinyi, 2011). In particular, a key axis of differentiation in many coastal communities in the Western Philippines (as elsewhere in the country) relates to migrant status (Knudsen, 2012, 2016). More recent migrants tend to have limited assets and need to fnd work on boats through actively setting up social relationships with boat owners. More recent migrants tend to be more socially and economically marginalised than residents who migrated earlier and have established themselves.

Differences in wealth and income are observed not just at the point of production (fshing), but also along the fsheries value chain. Depending on the type of fsh that is caught, fsh can be consumed within the

**Fig. 3.1** Nets of fshers in Darocotan Bay, Philippines. (Photo credit: Katherine Jack)

household, bartered or given away, or sold at local urban, larger urban or international markets. A characteristic feature of many of these fsh sales is that of the personalised economic relationship, which in essence involves a regular or favoured trading relationship (commonly referred to as *suki*). In theory, this offers mutual benefts for fshers and buyers: buyers are assured of regular supply, especially useful when supply is low, whereas fshers are assured of a regular buyer for their products (Ruddle, 2011). While local *suki* relationships are common, the intensity of the relationship can be increased when longer commodity chains and higher levels of capital are involved. In cases where fsh are transported internationally (e.g., squid, live reef fsh), buyers with greater resources fnance fshing trips, the construction of boats with engines, and in some cases even the personal expenses (e.g., school fees, food) of fshers. Fishers are bound to sell their catch to the buyer who has fnanced them, and those who are fnanced receive lower prices than those who do not rely on a fnancier and are able to independently sell their fsh.

The relationships between fshers and buyers in *suki* relationships are highly variable, but marked by power relations (Russell, 1987). This is particularly so when there are large differences in wealth between the two parties, and when a signifcant amount of credit is provided. In the case of export fsheries such as live fsh and squid, for example, the local buyers who can afford to extend credit to fshers are either agents of exporters based in Manila, or local entrepreneurs with signifcant assets, and in many cases are politically well connected. In these cases, the relationship between the fsher and the trader closely resembles that of the patron and the client common in analyses of the Philippine political system, where the patron supplies the client with protection and security, and the client provides a loyal vote. Many traders higher up the value chain, such as the agents of exporters based in the provinces or the exporters themselves, have connections with ethnic Chinese, for example, through marriage.

Important in these contexts is the ability of fshers to actively work social relations to obtain relevant introductions to buyers and/or fnanciers. The personalised nature of the relationship is apparent in the common use of fctive kinship terms (e.g., *kuya*, older brother; *tatay*, father), and references to specifc cultural values such as *pakinabangan* (reciprocity), *apa* (empathy) and *hiya* (shame) (Turgo, 2016). While patron–client relations in fsheries are sometimes criticised because some fshers become bound up in long-term debts (e.g., Padilla et al. 2003), fshers actively seek to turn these hierarchical relationships to their advantage. When negotiating the terms of such relationships, fshers will often appeal to strongly held moral values about the obligations of the well-off to take pity on the poor (*awa*) and of the poor's 'right to survive' (Szanton, 1972). Fishers' claims in these ongoing relationships (e.g., fnancing the purchase of a boat, or gaining a position on a fshing vessel) are, therefore, situated within a broader cultural context (Fabinyi, 2012). Thus, fshers are economically differentiated in relation to the production process itself, and along the value chain, in ways that intersect with other forms of differentiation such as migrant status, and with broader cultural values.

The diversity of the roles associated with fsheries production and trade and the ways in which these roles link in with overlapping class and status relationships mean that a 'fshing livelihood' can only be understood in relation to its position within the local grid of social relationships. Therefore, as with all livelihoods, relations of power are a crucial—and frequently overlooked—component of livelihoods (De Haan & Zoomers, 2005; Scoones, 2009). Often, these power relations are located beyond the geographically defned community in which a fsher lives: as Pauwelussen (2015: 332) notes in relation to Indonesian maritime peoples, 'affnity and loyalty follow translocal relations of kinship, credit, and debt rather than the borders of a village or island'.

These forms of differentiation and power relations are refected not only in everyday operations of fshing livelihoods, but also become particularly visible through governance interventions. Where MPAs are located may have greater consequences for some groups of fshers and not others, and the decision-making processes by which these locations are fnalised can refect these power dynamics. For example, inshore fshers without motorised boats—and who tend to be poorer and with less political clout—have been disadvantaged in the site selection of MPAs (Eder, 2005; Fabinyi, 2012).

In the Philippines, the importance of power relations also comes into play in discussions of various types of illegal fshing. Illegal fshing is a contested term that can encompass a diverse set of fshing activities, from the use of 'active' gears in municipal waters such as beach seines, to the incursion of large-scale commercial fshing vessels in municipal waters, to the use of air compressors and of destructive gears such as cyanide and dynamite. Elsewhere in the coastal Philippines, Knudsen (2012, 2013) has shown that more recent migrants with lower status were subtly excluded from the benefts of marine conservation projects, and were more frequently blamed for illegal fshing incidents. In other parts of the coastal Philippines, blast fshers (Galvez et al., 1989) and commercial fshers illegally fshing within coastal waters (Segi, 2014a) have effectively integrated into the local community and are tolerated because of their power deriving from the signifcant economic benefts they distribute. In other cases, well-resourced illegal fshers are alleged to simply bribe government offcials to allow them to operate (Fabinyi, 2012). In all these cases, formal governance of fshing livelihoods interacts with and is subsequently shaped by relationships of power and wealth on the ground.

## Gender in Fishing Livelihoods in Oceania

All over the world the participation of women in fshing livelihoods is overlooked (e.g., see Ram, 1991). It is diffcult to study women's roles in fsheries because data on fsheries are rarely disaggregated by sex of fsher (Harper et al., 2020). A systematic review of the literature on gender in fsheries found that in many parts of the world, including Africa and the Pacifc Islands, women tend to fsh close to shore, often gleaning for invertebrates, while men tend to fsh further away from shore and catch more vertebrates (Kleiber et al., 2015). The paper found that people, including women, tend to see women's fshing as assisting men's fshing or as assisting with household incomes or food production, rather than as being important activities in their own right. For example, women in Kiribati looking after young children may take them swimming in shallow water, but also take a net and catch fsh for dinner at the same time. When fshing is part-time or is for subsistence rather than for cash, it is often omitted from fsheries and census data collection. Moreover, gleaning as a method and invertebrates as catch are also often omitted from fsheries data collection (Gopal et al., 2020; Weeratunge et al., 2010). These factors combined render women's fshing invisible. For example, in the Pacifc Island country of Wallis and Futuna a fsheries offcial told a visiting fsheries consultant that women do not fsh in Wallis and Futuna. Later the consultant and the offcial had a lunch of shellfsh together. When asked who collected the shellfsh, the offcial answered that women did, but that this was not 'fshing' (Barclay et al., 2019: 3).

Fisheries researchers have found that in the countries of Oceania the proportion of women fshing for food and livelihoods ranges from around 20 per cent in some countries to around 50 per cent in others (Harper et al., 2013). One study in the Marovo Lagoon in Solomon Islands found that over 80 per cent of women fsh or glean for invertebrates, and 84 per cent of women who fsh target fnfsh rather than invertebrates (Rabbitt et al., 2019). Another study found that in Fiji women fshers play critical roles in food security and livelihoods (Thomas et al., 2020). However, the prevailing assumption that women do not fsh is so pervasive that many women who fsh do not see themselves as fshers, and data collection systems continue to omit the kinds of part-time, near-shore, invertebrate-focused fshing women most often do. For example, since around 2015 the Household Income and Expenditure Survey conducted in Pacifc Island countries has asked women and men whether they fsh for food and incomes. When the frst-year data were collected only 8 per cent of women reported that they worked as fshers (Secretariat of the Pacifc Community [SPC], 2017). Recognising that this fgure was improbably low, the following year the Report Card noted 'women's participation in fsheries is underestimated by [the survey] … with one country estimate being that no women are employed in fsheries (range 0% to 17%)' (2018: 3). The fgures were improved the year after that, with women being reported as making up 18 per cent of the fsheries workforce (range 8–38 per cent) (2019).

Gender blindness causes problems for sustainable resource management. For example, women's fshing often includes gleaning in the intertidal zone, which is rarely included in fsheries monitoring, meaning that monitoring is failing to pick up important information about human effects on marine ecosystems (Kleiber et al., 2015). Fijian women mud crab fshers have taken matters into their own hands and established a community-based fsheries management plan to address overfshing (Giffn et al., 2019). Vanuatu fsheries managers (pers. comm. with Barclay, May 2017) related that recent efforts to be more inclusive in their community consultations have revealed new and important factors for coastal fsheries management. In the past they had not been aware of practices used in octopus fshing, because it is mainly women who fsh for octopus in shallow waters. Fisheries managers had been used to talking only to men about fshing and focused on the types of fshing men did, usually further out from shore using boats. In the 2010s they started talking with women about their fshing. They discovered that the main way women fshed for octopus was through using metal bars to break or overturn the corals octopuses hide in, which is a destructive fshing practice. If they had only talked to men, as in the past, they would have remained unaware that destructive fshing practices were being used to fsh for octopus, and, thus, not addressed the problem.

In a community in Solomon Islands, research around fshing practices found that a local MPA was less effective than it could have been due to gender blindness in creating the MPA. Women were not effectively consulted and the MPA was placed over fshing grounds women commonly used. Thus, the MPA establishment process lacked legitimacy in women's eyes, and obeying the rules of the MPA would have made their lives more diffcult due to having to go further afeld to fsh, so some women were fouting the rules of the MPA by fshing in the no-take zone (Rohe et al., 2018).

Another example of overlooking the resource sustainability implications of near-shore fshing for invertebrates as part of a livelihood activity mainly conducted by women is that of shell money in the Langalanga Lagoon in Solomon Islands (see Fig. 3.2). Various kinds of customary exchange valuables have long been part of cultural life in Melanesia. The shell money produced in the Langalanga Lagoon continues to be valued

**Fig. 3.2** Shell money production in Langlalanga Lagoon, Solomon Islands. (Photo credit: Kate Barclay)

in modern life, with some types of pieces being used for weddings and other ceremonial purposes, and simpler pieces used as casual jewellery. White beads are made from a shell called in local language *kakadu* (*Anadara granosa*) and black beads used at the end of shell money strings are from *kurila* (*Atrina vexillum*). Some beads are heated to bring out their colour, including red beads from *romu* (*Chama pacifca*) and orange beads *ke'e* (*Beguina semiorbiculata*). With continuing demand for shell money the shells used have been depleted in the Langalanga area, so are supplied from further afeld in Solomon Islands. By 2014 traders were reporting that overfshing might also be occurring outside Langalanga, because the size of shells was getting smaller (Barclay et al., 2018). Solomon Islands has some important export fsheries for invertebrates, such as sea cucumber, trochus and pearl shells, so has long been monitoring and attempting to tackle overfshing through periodic export bans. However, the shells used for shell money are not on the list of species for monitoring. We do not know why this is the case, but in line with the global tendency to overlook women in fsheries, we speculate that it could be because shell money production in Langalanga is largely women's activity.

Another problem that arises from the invisibility of women's fshing is that training or funding for fsheries-related livelihood activities is usually targeted at men. For example, a project to support community-based aquaculture in Pacifc Island countries included a specifc gender focus and engaged gender specialists in some of their activities (Jimmy et al., 2019). They found in Fiji and Samoa that women and men tended to identify men as the fsh farmers, and not women, despite the fact that women were doing much of the day-to-day work operating fsh farms. A handful of farms in Fiji run by women were exceptions to this rule. In the past the tendency to assume men were fsh farmers and women were not meant that men received any training and were the ones involved in discussions with the fsheries agency supporting aquaculture, where decisions were made. The project concluded that fsheries agencies should have capacity building for gender analysis and gender mainstreaming so that they would be better able to observe where women were involved and include them appropriately in interventions (Jimmy et al., 2019). These fndings are similar to case studies of aquaculture in Bangladesh, where women's involvement is also underestimated, showing that with careful project design women may be empowered (Choudhury et al., 2017).

Even when fsheries agencies and other organisations involved in funding or implementing fsheries livelihood projects recognise that women are important players and should be involved, ingrained gender roles, norms and expectations can make it diffcult to meaningfully engage women. It is not as simple as just inviting women to the meetings where projects will be planned and decisions made—although that is a necessary frst small step. After the WorldFish offce in Solomon Islands had been through a process of capacity building to tackle gender transformation in their work, they started to implement this in their work with fshing communities. In one of their early attempts they found diffculties even in inviting women to meetings when they went out to villages. Their established way of inviting people to meetings was by letter or through other communication with village leaders, who were men and who were not accustomed to passing on news about such upcoming meetings to women in their communities. Thus, the feldworkers had to organise meetings with women once they arrived, by walking around the village and seeing which women could participate at short notice. For their part women were not accustomed to participating in such meetings, so eliciting their participation was hard, and focus groups took much longer than planned. Women in Solomon Islands have less formal schooling than men, so it was more diffcult to translate some concepts that were not part of their daily lives, such as 'nutrition' (Jones et al., 2014). Pursuing their aim for livelihoods activities to be gender transformative, over the years since that frst attempt WorldFish Solomon Islands staff have accumulated learning about how to effectively engage village women in livelihood activities. These include many practical points such as ensuring that women are not spending a great deal of time cooking for visitor meetings, and that meetings work around any caring responsibilities women may have (Gomese et al., 2020; Lawless et al., 2017).

Finally, gender intersects with other forms of social marginalisation. Some communities, including the women in them, see that the most pressing social issues affecting their livelihoods are related to factors other than gender, and they want those other issues dealt with frst in any interventions. For example, in a study of the contributions of tuna fsheries to coastal communities, one of the study areas was a fshing village specialising in handlining for yellowfn tuna near Gizo in Solomon Islands. The members of this village are ethnic I-Kiribati, having migrated from the former British territory of the Gilbert and Ellis Islands during the twentieth century, but they are Solomon Islands citizens (McClean et al., 2019). The broader study found that across the study locations in Solomon Islands and Indonesia the main factors affecting the distribution of contributions from fsheries to livelihoods were gender, ethnicity (especially migrant status) and socio-economic status. However, when the Gizo participants (women and men) were asked about gender as a factor, they responded that they were not concerned about the gender relations in fshing. They wanted the project to report on their marginalisation as a migrant community, and for any interventions to address those problems (McClean et al., 2019).

## Conclusion

While the idea of a 'fsher' is a convenient shorthand term, it conceals both the diversity of practices associated with a fshing livelihood, and the other forms of identity that interact with a fshing livelihood. Different types of fshers and others whose livelihoods are based on the fsh value chain have different sets of interests, and frequently these roles correspond with other forms of identity such as gender or ethnicity. Such forms of difference are also organised hierarchically in relations of power (i.e., particular groups of fshers and social groups tend to be marginalised, while others are not). While in some contexts such forms of marginalisation are arguably becoming increasingly well recognised (e.g., in relation to gender), in other contexts marginalisation can be more diffcult to unpack and recognise (e.g., relationships between recent migrants and long-term residents).

The implication for fsheries governance is that these forms of social differentiation infuence how people respond to or are affected by any new fsheries governance initiative. For example, a new MPA or the imposition of a closed season is mediated and infuenced by these social institutions. Failure to be inclusive can simply mean that the governance intervention fails to achieve its objectives, as in the case of the MPA in Solomon Islands (Rohe et al., 2018), while inclusive resource management can enable fsheries agencies to better manage resources, as in the case of octopus fshing in Vanuatu. In some cases, failure to be inclusive can lead to signifcant social effects and generate social tensions (e.g., Segi, 2014b). While the challenges for organisations and policymakers in recognising and addressing social difference are signifcant, and require long-term sustained effort, the potential for genuinely improving fshing livelihoods is correspondingly substantial. For example, WorldFish as an organisation has spent many years embedding a gender transformative approach to its work. It can now point to measurable outcomes from interventions, whereby women have increased choice regarding income activities in seafood supply chain and control over the income they generate, with corresponding positive effects for their families (Cole et al., 2020).

## References


**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

CHAPTER 4

# Fisheries Governance

**Abstract** This chapter examines the role that governance plays in shaping fshing livelihoods. This includes formal government regulation as well as other factors that shape fshing, such as markets, buyer requirements and social norms. Institutional arrangements serve as a key component of fshing livelihoods, by prescribing the conditions under which fshing livelihoods operate. In this chapter we sketch out some of the trends in fsheries governance across parts of the Asia-Pacifc, before discussing examples in Australia and Indonesia.

**Keywords** Fisheries governance • Neoliberalism • Resource nationalism • Indonesia • Australia

This chapter turns to an examination of the role that governance plays in shaping fshing livelihoods. While fshing has long been perceived as a classic example of the 'tragedy of the commons'1 the reality is that most if not all fshing livelihoods are signifcantly affected by some sort of institutional arrangements (Kooiman et al., 2005; Ostrom, 1990). These institutional arrangements serve as a key component of fshing livelihoods, by prescribing the conditions under which fshing livelihoods operate. This chapter

1Or more accurately, the tragedy of open access (Bromley & Cernea, 1989; Ostrom, 1990).

sketches out some of the trends in fsheries governance across parts of the Asia-Pacifc, before moving on to discuss examples in Australia and Indonesia.

Adapting a defnition from Hall et al. (2011: 16) in relation to land, here we consider governance as the formal and informal rules that govern access and exclusion over fsheries resources. While state-based governance is most commonly thought of when governance is discussed, many other wider sets of social institutions regulate access to and exclusion from fsheries resources (Bromley, 1992; Kooiman et al., 2005; Ostrom, 1990). In addition to government, civil society and private sector actors are increasingly involved in governance partnerships. Other institutions include informal social norms, conventions or negotiated arrangements, such as those between different groups of fshers surrounding gear use, or between fshers and traders surrounding fnancing and credit.

States of the Asia-Pacifc, as elsewhere, have profoundly different levels of governance capacity and resources devoted to fsheries governance. In many small-scale fsheries across the Asia-Pacifc, fsheries are effectively 'self-governed'. In other words, the formal reach of the state has limited purchase, and access to fsheries resources is governed through customary and/or informal institutions that overlap with many of the social institutions described in Chap. 3. For example, in much of the Pacifc forms of customary marine tenure can regulate access to marine space along clan lines (Carrier, 1981), or restrict access to waters for a certain period of time (Cohen & Foale, 2013; Hviding, 1996). Other variations of customary institutions have been well documented for South-East Asia (Ruddle & Satria, 2010) and South Asia (Coulthard, 2011). An important point to note in this context is that these customary institutions were largely not designed to manage marine resources biologically or ecologically, but to regulate social access (i.e., restricting fshing access to neighbouring groups) (Foale et al., 2011). In contemporary times, many of these customary institutions have been signifcantly transformed or now coexist with more formal state regulations in conditions of legal pluralism (Bavinck, 2018; Bavinck et al., 2013; Lau et al., 2020).

Historically, the most fundamental model of fsheries governance by states in the Asia-Pacifc has been one of resource nationalism (Koch & Perreault, 2019), where states have explicitly aimed to expand fsheries production and trading. As Campling and Havice (2018: 88) point out in their insightful historical analysis of national seafood production systems, 'national seafood systems promoted volume [of extraction] to ensure the reproduction of domestic capital, sustain new industrial societies by providing cheap food for workers and their families, and extend[ed] geopolitical infuence'. This process was refected throughout the vast drive towards industrial expansion in much of Asia in the postwar period, discussed in Chap. 2 (see Butcher, 2004; Christensen, 2014). In the Pacifc, a related variety of resource nationalism took place through a domestication model, mostly for tuna. This involved leveraging good natural resources and tariff advantages to compensate for distance from trade routes, lack of infrastructure and high labour costs (Barclay & Cartwright, 2008).

In many developing countries of the Asia-Pacifc there has been a shift towards the concept of 'co-management', centred around the principle of shared responsibility for management between the state and resource users, as well as the participation of other stakeholders such as civil society groups (Evans et al., 2011; Ratner et al., 2012). The underlying objective was to improve both the effectiveness of fsheries resource management and the legitimacy of the state through the active participation of resource users. In practice, co-management models vary on a continuum from centralised, where government undertakes most functions, through consultative and collaborative, to delegated models, where fshers undertake most governance functions (Pomeroy & Berkes, 1997).

The outcomes of co-management initiatives in the Asia-Pacifc are highly variable (Quimby & Levine, 2018; Sunderlin & Gorospe, 1997). In Indonesia and the Philippines, for example, co-management is strongly infuenced by other social institutions, including kinship, ethnicity, or customary leadership structures, which affect whose interests are prioritised and who effectively participates in decision-making (Eder, 2005; Steenbergen, 2016). Across South-East Asia, the development of comanagement has in many cases been supported by foreign donors, linked in with the rise of community-based management programmes or accompanied by the decentralisation of fsheries management to local governments (Christie et al., 2005; Courtney & White, 2000). For example, in the Philippines decentralisation led to the demarcation of designated spatial zones for small-scale and industrial fshers (with varying degrees of enforcement). Australia has a centralised model, whereby representatives of industry are involved in advisory groups that meet with fsheries agency staff and review documents but have no decision-making power. Many fshers feel profoundly disempowered in this system (Barclay et al., 2020; King & O'Meara, 2019). Japan has had a delegated model with some fsheries management decisions made through fsheries cooperatives, which during the twentieth century acted well to protect fsher interests, but was not successful at preventing overfshing in key fsheries such as tuna (Barclay & Koh, 2008).

Common to both richer and poorer countries has been a shift towards EBFM, which aims to replace conventional fsheries science based only on the target species, with understanding of a fshery's effects on the broader ecosystem (Pikitch et al., 2004). For example, some trawl fsheries catch a great deal of other species in addition to the target species, and may damage habitat through dragging trawling gear along the bottom of the sea. A conventional fsheries science approach would look only at the stocks of target species. An EBFM approach would look at all the species being affected by the trawling, and the effect of dragging on the ocean foor. Despite widespread acceptance by governments and scientists internationally since the early 1990s that fsheries should be managed as part of ecosystems (Pikitch et al., 2004), EBFM has largely not been implemented. EBFM constitutes a radical change from existing single species-based management, and it has been unclear how the shift to EBFM may feasibly be achieved (Barclay, 2016). Closely linked with the emergence of marine spatial planning, EBFM is also often associated with the implementation of MPAs. The long-time horizons and variable nature of fshery benefts generated by fsh spillover from MPAs, combined with the short-term effects on fshing grounds, mean that the implementation of MPAs has had mixed results for fsher livelihoods (Ban et al., 2019; Gill et al., 2019; Segi, 2014).

More recently has been a shift to what has been broadly termed as 'private' or 'market-based governance', based on the idea of market actors taking a leading role in governing for environmental sustainability (Bush & Oosterveer, 2019; Groeneveld et al., 2017). This idea has been most notably applied to fsheries in the case of eco-certifcation and labelling (e.g., the MSC and the sustainable seafood movement). Under this model of governance, transparency is implemented through traceability documentation (Bailey et al., 2016). While the direct involvement of the private sector as leading actors in fsheries governance is a relatively new phenomenon, it builds on the logic of economic rationalism, or neoliberalism, that has driven much fsheries governance for several decades, especially in richer countries.

Neoliberalism as a particular type of governance, especially of economic activity, has become increasingly widespread since the 1980s. Neoliberalism is an all-embracing kind of term, used in some cases to refer to specifc policy mixes involving deregulation, privatisation and use of market mechanisms in the policy sphere, but also to refer more diffusely to a form of governmentality (McCormack, 2017a). In marine governance neoliberalism has taken shape from a particular vision dating from the 1950s of oceans as commons with inherent problems of overfshing and overcapacity (Mansfeld, 2004). In this logic it is human nature to overexploit commons resources, to competitively race to fsh and innovate technologically in that race to fsh, causing both overfshing and overcapacity (McCormack, 2017a). Converting ocean commons to private property and then using market mechanisms to allocate access to the resource is seen as a way to harness the proft motive to achieve conservation objectives and improve economic effciency (Mansfeld, 2004; McCormack, 2017a). Public access to resources has been limited by turning commons into private property that can be controlled and traded (Mansfeld, 2007). In fsheries management neoliberal privatisation and market mechanisms have been brought together in the form of individual transferable quotas (ITQs) (Mansfeld, 2004; McCormack, 2017a, 2017b; Pinkerton, 2017).

ITQs build on existing foundations in fsheries science of stock assessments generating a TAC—an amount of the target species that may be harvested annually. In ITQs the TAC is divided into quota shares, which are often allocated among fshers according to catch history or levels of investment. Each quota holder is allowed to catch up to the limit of its quota (usually a tonnage). This is called an 'output' control on fsheries, in that the control is on what comes out of the fshery, as opposed to 'input' controls on what goes into a fshery, such as controls on gear (e.g., net mesh size) or temporal limits to the fshing season. Fishing quotas may be traded. Less effcient operators tend to sell their quota to more effcient operators in a process that reduces the overall number of quota owners and increases the proftability of the quota owners who remain. However, this does not necessarily mean fshers themselves experience economic improvements. For example, the British Columbia halibut fshery is often hailed as an ITQ economic success, but 79 per cent of the quota was leased—most fshers did not own quota themselves. For quota-leasing fshers the economics of operational and leasing costs in relation to fsh prices was much less favourable (Pinkerton & Edwards, 2009).

ITQ proponents argue that having property rights in fsheries encourages quota owners to see their wealth as dependent on the health of fsh stocks, therefore, encouraging stewardship of the resource (McCormack, 2017a). There is no empirical evidence that ITQs are correlated with or cause norm change regarding environmental stewardship (Hoshino et al., 2019). Indeed, ITQ systems have been found to encourage high grading and dumping, poaching and under-reporting (McCormack, 2017b; Pinkerton, 2017).

The neoliberal ITQ model has not universally been seen as a good template for fsheries management. For example, in Japan the preferred model has been for co-management with fsheries cooperatives, whereby the cooperatives were largely responsible for controlling the fshing activities of members (Barclay & Epstein, 2013; Barclay & Koh, 2008). The Japanese co-management with cooperatives model has not been particularly successful at curbing overfshing, with two infamous examples being whaling and bluefn tuna fsheries (Epstein & Barclay, 2013), but it has arguably been effective in terms of managing conficts between fshers (Matsuda, 1987) and preserving fshing livelihoods in rural parts of Japan (Barclay & Koh, 2008). Nevertheless, neoliberal fsheries management ideas have eventually started to infltrate Japan's fsheries management and into that of many other countries that have hitherto resisted ITQs (McCormack, 2017a: 32). Yet, at the same time, challenges to neoliberalism in fsheries policy are also gaining ground around the world (Pinkerton, 2017).

ITQs may only be feasible in wealthy countries, because they require a high level of state involvement in ascertaining TACs and administering quota systems. Moreover, ITQs embody a 'wealth' rather than a 'welfare' orientation regarding fsheries (Béné et al., 2010). ITQs explicitly aim to accumulate the wealth of a fshery among fewer participants (Hoshino et al., 2019; Pinkerton, 2017). Even early studies noted that ITQs tend to concentrate ownership, causing smaller operators to leave the industry (Connor & Alden, 2001; McCay, 1995). Studies have found there is often decreased employment in fsheries where ITQs are implemented, and that high quota prices act as a barrier preventing fshers from becoming quota owners (Hoshino et al., 2019).

In this introductory section of the chapter we have briefy highlighted several of the most prominent models for fsheries governance that are widely adopted around the world, such as customary institutions, resource nationalism, co-management, EBFM, market-based fsheries governance and neoliberalism. An important point to note about all governance models is that they are not neutral technical interventions, but represent particular ideas about the world, based on valuations of people and the environment (Li, 2007). As formal regulations become implemented in practice, they interact with other social institutions such as culture and social norms that, in turn, have been generated over time. In this chapter we consider two cases of different governance models operating in very different contexts and trace their implications for fshing livelihoods.

## Fisheries Governance in Australia

Fisheries governance in Australia until the end of the 1980s was largely open access, aimed at generating jobs and increasing food supplies. There was overfshing and had been since the earliest days of colonisation (Wilkinson, 1997). For example, settlers in South Australia harvested oysters so excessively they wiped out many oyster beds in the 1800s (Wallace-Carter, 1987). In line with a general move towards ecologically sustainable development around 1990, fsheries management moved towards biologically sustainable fshing, preventing overfshing. In terms of economic goals for fsheries, the Australian Government (2019) aims to 'maximise the net economic return to the Australian community' (Commonwealth of Australia, 2017: 2) from the use of fsheries resources, and to have 'cost recovery'—meaning have fshers pay for fsheries management (Patterson et al., 2020). Australian fsheries governance since the 1990s has favoured proftable fsheries over other economic considerations such as job creation, and implemented ITQs fairly widely.

One of the prominent models of fshing in Australia has been that of small-scale fshing using a single boat with diversifed methods across species, gear, locations and markets, to respond to fuctuations in environmental and market conditions (Minnegal & Dwyer, 2008; Voyer et al., 2016) (see Fig. 4.1). It was a viable business model to manage the inherent risks in near-shore and estuarine fsheries that have great natural variation in stock availability (Barclay et al., 2020; Voyer et al., 2016). By the late 1990s fsheries management in Australia had moved in a direction that discouraged this kind of fshing in favour of larger-scale specialist operations (Minnegal & Dwyer, 2008). This was part of a wave of similar policies pursued internationally to discourage smaller diversifed operators in favour of larger-scale specialist operators (Hilborn et al., 2001). Diversifed small operators are generally not as effcient as larger operations with equipment specialised for a specifc fshery, and Australian fsheries management has worked to reduce feet sizes by pushing out ineffcient operators (Connor & Alden, 2001).

**Fig. 4.1** Fisher with freshly caught eel in Victoria, Australia. (Photo credit: Impress Photography)

Small-scale diversifed fshers were also discouraged because of the ecologically sustainable development approach wanting to reduce 'latent capacity' or 'latent effort'. Diversifed operators keep rights in fsheries they do not often use so that when the environmental and market conditions suit they can work in that fshery, but most of the time they do not. In practical terms there is not overfshing because the rights are not fully used, but there is the potential that if fshers did fully use all of their rights at once there could be overfshing. As fsheries managers want to reduce this risk, they have moved to get rid of little-used rights (Barclay et al., 2020; Minnegal & Dwyer, 2008).

Regulation in favour of economic effciency and eliminating latent effort has, thus, discouraged diversifed fshing. Alongside the regulation has been a discourse that delegitimises fshing operations that are low proft. The concepts of net economic returns to the community and cost recovery mean that fsheries 'should' be able to pay a resource rent back to government and cover fsheries management costs. If they are not proftable enough to do this then it is argued that they should not have access to the resource. Fishers who are not very proftable have been stigmatised as 'lifestyle' fshers rather than as 'business-oriented' fshers. Simply supporting a family or employing oneself in one's chosen vocation is no longer seen as a legitimate use of commons fsheries resources (Minnegal & Dwyer, 2008; Voyer et al., 2016).

Australian fsheries management since the 1990s has been neoliberal, working towards privatising resource access rights in ITQs and allocating them through market mechanisms (Bichler et al., 2019; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, n.d.) as the best way to meet the objectives of ecologically sustainable development and economic effciency in Commonwealth and state fsheries legislation (Commonwealth of Australia, 2017; Minnegal & Dwyer, 2008). Not all fsheries were put under ITQ management in the 1990s or subsequently, but even non-ITQ fsheries were strongly infuenced by the governance mode prioritising the prevention of overfshing over the social benefts of fsheries, and favouring proftable operating styles over ones that generate more jobs.

Some large-scale, high-value fsheries have fourished with this type of management. For example, the highly migratory southern bluefn tuna were thoroughly overfshed internationally by the 1980s. Prior to the fshery coming under quota management, 136 fshing boats were in the southern bluefn tuna fshery across three Australian states. ITQs were introduced into the southern bluefn fshery in 1984 and well over half of the boats left the fshery within two years (Campbell et al., 2000). By the mid-1990s all southern bluefn quota had been consolidated into 13 companies based in Port Lincoln in South Australia. There the industry developed a ranching system that enabled the fshery to recover economically, becoming so successful that the regional economy around Port Lincoln was boosted by the industry. Port Lincoln became famous for having a high per-capita number of millionaire 'tuna barons', but the industry also generated a great deal of jobs. In the fnancial year 2016–2017 tuna farming in Port Lincoln and fow-on activities such as processing and transport amounted to 856 full-time equivalent jobs, and each of these jobs is estimated to have created an additional 2.13 jobs elsewhere in the state economy (Econsearch, 2018).

However, in other Australian ITQ fsheries fshers' livelihoods have not fared so well. For example, in Tasmania's abalone fshery much of the quota is owned by investors who lease the quota to fshers for harvesting. Profts in the fshery go to the quota owners rather than the fshers, and the fshers have no security of access to the resource. Quota prices are prohibitively high, which combined with quota rarely coming onto the market means a barrier to new entrants (Hoshino et al., 2019).

The ITQ model is now being rolled out in lower-value, small-scale, multi-species, multi-gear fsheries that have made up the majority of fshing in parts of Australia, and many in the industry are concerned about negative effects on livelihoods. ITQs were implemented broadly in New South Wales from 2017. The effects on income and employment are not clear because no data are collected on these aspects of fsheries in most of Australia, but a majority of fshers say the reforms have damaged their livelihoods, and their wellbeing appears to have suffered from the reform process (Barclay et al., 2020). Fishers in Queensland and South Australia facing imminent ITQ reforms similarly fear that many operators will be forced out of the industry (McClean, Voyer, et al., 2019b; Sutton Sutton, 2020).

A neoliberal approach to fsheries, including ITQs, is also at odds with the values, rights, knowledge systems and social practices of Indigenous peoples in Australia (Lalancette, 2017; Schnierer & Egan, 2015). ITQs have been embedded into Māori fshing rights by the New Zealand Government, which has led to widening income inequality between general tribe members and those with decision-making rights over quota, and reduced Māori people's rights to fsh as a livelihood (McCormack, 2013).

Over the same time period as the Australian Government took a neoliberal approach to fsheries management and shifted from supporting livelihoods to preventing overfshing, conservationist perspectives have also permeated the Australian public consciousness more broadly. Science communication and conservation organisation media campaigns spread awareness of the problems of overfshing internationally. Images of overfshing were received by the Australian public in ways that resulted in a cultural devaluing of fsheries as a livelihood. Fishing, previously somewhat stigmatised because of its working-class status, has become even more stigmatised, with fshers often treated by the public as environmental 'rapers and pillagers' (Kearney, 2013).

Australian fshers are sometimes spat on and have rocks thrown at them, their vehicles and fshing equipment are vandalised, and strangers yell at them, claiming that they are destroying the marine environment (King, 2018; Voyer et al., 2016). Some people fsh at night to avoid encounters with the public at the wharf, and build high fences to hide fshing gear in their yards. Some children of fshers lie at school about their parents' jobs (Voyer et al., 2016). There is a budding food localism movement, but in general fshers are not valued in Australian society as food producers. Over 70 per cent of seafood consumed in Australia is imported (Kearney, 2013).

In Australia the public has been primed with the narrative 'they take all the fsh' by the recreational fshing movement. Recreational fshing has long been a popular pastime in Australia, and complaints by recreational fshers that their sport is ruined by professional fshers taking too many fsh were published in Sydney newspapers as early as the 1860s (Clark, 2017). Since the 1970s recreational fshing has grown in popularity and since the 2000s recreational fshing lobby groups have leveraged their large constituency to wield a great deal of political infuence (Voyer et al., 2017).

Lack of public support for professional fshing, environmental movements focused on establishing reserves where fshing is banned, and recreational fshing lobbying activities have caused professional fshers to lose access to fshing grounds. In 2001 professional fshers had access to 113 water bodies in New South Wales, of which 24 supplied 95 per cent of all fsh caught professionally in the state. By 2012 professional fshing was banned or restricted in 15 of those 24, due to zoning of those water bodies as 'recreational fshing havens' or MPAs (Stevens et al., 2012: 5). In Victoria the recreational fshing lobby has succeeded in having the state government ban professional fshing in places such as Port Philip Bay, despite the scientifc evidence indicating that those fsheries were biologically sustainable, and with no evidence that removing professional fshing would improve recreational fshing outcomes (King & O'Meara, 2019).

What will happen to fshing livelihoods in Australian in the future? Not many young people are willing or able to enter the fshing industry for a range of reasons outlined above—the high cost of buying quota, lost fshing grounds, the stigma fshing has acquired as environmentally damaging—and other reasons to do with diffcult regulations and high production costs (Abernethy et al., 2020; Barclay et al., 2020; King et al., 2019; Minnegal & Dwyer, 2008; Shaw et al., 2011; Voyer et al., 2016). Fishing livelihoods remain but are increasingly in corporate operations rather than the small-scale diverse fsheries that characterised much Australian fshing in the past. There is also a group of family businesses capitalising on growing food localism among consumers and moving up the value chain into direct sales, for example, through farmers markets (Abernethy et al., 2020; Voyer et al., 2016). With market disruptions due to COVID-19 there has been reorientation of export value chains to domestic markets, and interest in local production of food has strengthened. Therefore, there is hope for fshers who weather the COVID-19 storm and the longer-term pressures of neoliberal governance.

## Fisheries Governance in Indonesia

Fisheries governance in Indonesia is very different to that of Australia. Indonesia is a much larger producing state, the second largest fshery producer by volume in the world after China, whereas Australia is around fftieth. Indonesia's fsheries are diverse, mostly informal and small scale, spread across thousands of beaches, ports and inland waterways. Fishing is foundational to the food supply and livelihoods of coastal communities in Indonesia's very large population. Around 12 per cent are below the poverty line and 27 per cent are characterised as being vulnerable to slipping into poverty. Poverty rates are disproportionately high in fshing communities (World Bank, 2015). As a middle-income country Indonesia has less government resources available for fsheries management than highincome countries like Australia.

For centuries fshing has been a mainstay livelihood activity along the vast stretches of coast and inland waterways of the islands that became the modern state of Indonesia. This included food for local consumption as well as the trade in dried marine products, such as *trepang* (dried sea cucumbers) that have long been traded around South-East Asia and to China. As in the rest of South-East Asia, European colonial arrangements and then Japanese fshing companies were infuential in the establishment of industrial fshing in the twentieth century.

In the 1970s Japan retreated somewhat from international fshing, due to rising wages and other production costs in the Japanese feet, including the advent of fshing access payments due to the establishment of 200 nm EEZs under UNCLOS (Barclay, 2014). This left space for Indonesian industrial fshing companies to develop. In 1975 the Indonesian Government created the tuna longline company Perikanan Samodra Besar (known also as PSB or PERSERO), which early on worked with the Japanese feet, but then moved on to operate independently. In the 1980s, the company expanded, and the Indonesian Government fnancially supported other industrial fshing companies (Morgan & Staples, 2006).

State governance of fsheries in Indonesia has largely been oriented to industrial fshing and processing, taking a resource nationalist approach of increasing production to increase economic benefts. Indonesia's support for domestic industrial fsheries was part of a tide of resource nationalism among former colonies in the 1970s. Newly decolonised states hoped to use control over their own resources to establish a New International Economic Order, wherein former colonies were not subordinated to former coloniser states. They took inspiration from what OPEC countries managed to achieve with their oil resources. In fsheries this coincided with the negotiations that led to UNCLOS, with states taking economic control of waters to 200 nm from their coast (i.e., EEZs), meaning distant water fshing states like Japan had to negotiate access to fshing grounds they had previously used for free. Therefore, in fsheries, the 1970s trend for resource nationalism took the form of developing domestic industrial fsheries, requiring distant water fshing states to invest in joint ventures and onshore processing, or to pay fees in return for access to EEZs (Schurman, 1998).

Indonesia's 2004 *Fisheries Act* has nine objectives for fsheries management, one of which is about guaranteeing the sustainability of fsh resources, and the other eight are about using the resources for economic goals, including improved living standards for small-scale fshers, government revenue, population nutrition, and supporting industrial fshing and processing. However, to date, Indonesian state management of fsheries has mainly facilitated industrial expansion in fshing and processing, rather than monitoring fsh stocks or applying limits to fsheries for the purpose of sustaining fsh stocks (California Environmental Associates [CEA], 2018; Sunoko & Huang, 2014). The expansion of fshing has meant more jobs on feets, in processing and in fsh trading. It is diffcult to say exactly how many people have incomes from fshing in Indonesia, but it is likely in the millions. For example, in the area around Bitung, which is a major industrial tuna fshing and processing hub in Eastern Indonesia, it is estimated there are at least 12,000 small-scale tuna fshers (Sukarsih et al., 2019) (see Fig. 4.2). There would be thousands more on the industrial feet and in the processing plants.

Indonesian government capacity to monitor and regulate fsheries is limited as a developing country with a huge population and enormous fsheries spread over thousands of islands, as well as a complex governance system between national, provincial and municipal level agencies (Cabral et al., 2018). Overall fsheries policy and licensing for vessels over 30 GT, and management of maritime areas outside 12 nm, sits with national offces of the Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries. Areas within 12 nm are the responsibility of provincial government offces of the Ministry.

**Fig. 4.2** Freshly caught yellowfn tuna. (Photo credit: Katherine Jack)

Small vessels must be registered but do not pay license fees. Indonesia has had limited control over fsheries and poor fsheries data, in part because of the huge diverse feet operating from thousands of mostly informal landing sites (Cabral et al., 2018; CEA 2018). Given that Indonesia is such a signifcant fshing country, since the 1990s other countries sharing migratory stocks such as tuna have worked with Indonesia through regional fsheries management organisation ('RFMO') processes to try to improve data (Hanich et al., 2010).

Indonesian fsheries governance shifted somewhat with the appointment of Minister of Fisheries Susi Pudjiastuti (2014–2019). With a dual agenda to prevent illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fshing and to replace foreign investment, Minister Susi presided over the implementation of policies that saw Filipino fshers and vessels leave Indonesian waters, including exploding confscated fshing vessels (Cabral et al., 2018; McClean, Barclay, et al., 2019a). In addition to removing foreign vessels, the anti-IUU measures also decreased the amount of tuna from Indonesian waters being sent overseas for processing, with the aim to increase the supply of fsh for Indonesian processors—although in the short term the removal of Filipino vessels caused fsh supplies for the industrial processors to drop (McClean, Barclay, et al., 2019a). Prior to Susi's tenure, the government largely neglected small-scale fsheries, and here again Susi broke new ground. She announced that the Filipino large-scale tuna fshing vessels banned from 2014 would be replaced with 3325 new small- to medium-scale vessels to be built in Indonesia with government funding and given to Indonesian fshers (McClean, Barclay, et al., 2019a).

Minister Susi's tenure was intensely controversial in the Indonesian seafood industry, but she had popular support and remained in the post for fve years. She was eventually replaced in 2019 by Edhy Prabowo, who was less obvious in supporting any particular governance direction. In November 2020 Minister Prabowo was arrested for alleged corruption regarding exports of lobster seed (Dao, 2020).

The Indonesian Government has not so far implemented neoliberal fsheries management tools such as ITQs. It does not have TACs, which are foundational for ITQs. The Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries continues to work towards strengthening data collection and stock assessment, aiming to develop harvest strategies for key fsheries such as tuna (Hoshino et al., 2020). In line with fsheries management internationally, Indonesia is also moving towards ecosystem-based management, with comanagement between government and industry (Muawanah et al., 2018).

There has been some adoption of certifcation for export markets, with effects that constitute a limited form of market-based governance. One issue with market-based certifcation is that it requires extensive documentation and verifcation at each stage of the supply chain. Such 'audit culture' was developed in high-income countries and is highly unsuited to small-scale informal Indonesian fsheries, where documentation is not a normal part of life (Bush et al., 2013). Therefore, small-scale fshers entering into certifcation require intermediaries to assist with the documentation; these are usually the trading companies that buy the fsh for export.

On the biological front, several fsheries are in MSC assessment or are moving towards it as part of fshery improvement programmes, which are mostly supported by philanthropic organisations (Levine et al., 2020). Some small-scale handline tuna fsheries exporting to US markets entered fair-trade certifcation in the mid-2010s. Fair-trade fshers are paid a price premium as a community development fund, which can be used for mutually benefcial things such as fshing safety equipment or community projects. For the purposes of traceability catches are documented, which creates an opportunity to monitor catches (previously small-scale catches were not recorded). Over 700 fshers around Ambon now provide catch data that feed into provincial-level fsheries data collection used in decision-making Fisheries Co-Management Committees (McClean, Barclay, et al., 2019a). In recent years the use of forced labour (slavery) in Indonesian fsheries and seafood processing has become a prominent issue but as yet there is no market-based measure that effectively tackles labour conditions.

Diverse forms of customary practices and laws relating to marine spaces at the local level remain important institutions across the country. For example, among Sama-Bajau fshers there are prohibitions against harming or hunting whale sharks (Stacey et al., 2012). In Aceh Province there are local 'sea commanders' (*panglima laot*) who are responsible for enforcing laws relating to the sea, such as dispute resolution among fshers, access to fshing grounds, and management of mooring sites and ports (Nurasa et al., 1993; Wilson & Linkie, 2012). In other parts of Indonesia, such as in Maluku and Sulawesi, customary laws such as spatial and temporal closures (e.g., for trochus) of marine resources (*sasi*) have been well documented (Satria & Adhuri, 2010; Thorburn, 2000). Typically, such customary practices and laws form part of wider social institutions, and have varying levels of codifcation, recognition by government, and enforcement. They can be highly dynamic and, increasingly, environmental NGOs are assessing and harnessing these customary practices and laws for their potential to contribute to marine conservation and sustainable resource management (McLeod et al., 2009; Zerner, 1994).

## Conclusion

Different modes of fsheries governance have evolved across the Asia-Pacifc at multiple scales of governance. Highly diverse, they represent competing logics of how to manage people and resources. Customary forms of governance have long regulated access to marine resources, embedded within the wider social worlds of culture and social relationships. As the power and capacity of many states grew after World War II, resource nationalism became the default policy for many states in the Asia-Pacifc, as they sought to extract the maximum benefts from their oceans through extensive support for commercial fshing industries. More recently, concerns about overfshing and ecological degradation have also become key factors underlying fsheries governance in many countries, as have forms of governance that seek to harness, and maximise, the fnancial aspects of fsheries. Many high-income countries have adopted neoliberal fsheries policy approaches, which focus on aggregate generation of wealth, rather than focusing on welfare, considering the distribution of livelihoods across groups in society. In contrast, movements that emphasise the roles, knowledge, expertise and rights of local communities and fshers have manifested in forms of governance such as co-management and human rights-based approaches (Allison et al., 2012; Jentoft et al., 2017).

There is an implicit assumption in some of the fsheries literature that policymaking is a technical process, that it is possible to attain the right outcomes if only the right governance institutions are put in place. Yet, policies are always implemented in particular contexts—they interact with pre-existing forms of governance, and with the social and politicaleconomic contexts discussed in Chaps. 2 and 3. Understanding how the policymaking *process* itself evolves is just as signifcant for assessing outcomes as the particular contents of any policy. For example, in the Australian case, the intersection of recreational fshing, conservation discourse and neoliberal fsheries management converged to govern fshing livelihoods in particular ways.

Ultimately, governance institutions that unfold in particular contexts shape the kinds of livelihoods that are on offer and to whom. In the Indonesian case, state regulation has meant that Filipino fshers were pushed out by new regulations, while informal and customary institutions also enable some groups to fsh and not others. Certifcation initiatives require collaborators to handle the paperwork, which leads to fshers being dependent on those partners, and fshers who do not have such partnerships are excluded from certifcation (McClean, Barclay, et al., 2019a). In the Australian case, the neoliberal approach to governing fsheries has led away from small-scale diversifed fshing livelihoods towards more corporate, specialised operations.

In the context of the blue economy—where interest by state, market and civil society actors in the governance and use of the oceans is rapidly expanding (Voyer et al., 2018)—the infuence of different ideas about governance on fshing livelihoods will only increase. Fishing livelihoods have been under pressure to demonstrate their environmental sustainability and the transparency and traceability of their operations, and to comply with intensifed environmental governance such as MPAs. As the generation of economic wealth and the protection of the natural environment emerge as powerful themes in the blue economy, ensuring that fshing livelihoods are adequately represented and included in governance is a crucial challenge for policymakers.

## References


fessional fshing industry, recreational fshing and marine tourism in coastal communities in NSW, Australia. *Marine Policy, 76*, 114–121. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.marpol.2016.11.029


**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made.

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CHAPTER 5

# Fishing Livelihoods and Wellbeing

**Abstract** The fnal chapter of this book discusses the implications of a relational approach to fshing livelihoods for governance for improved social and ecological outcomes. The chapter reviews some of the ways in which academics, activists and policymakers can use approaches that emphasise the relational context of fshing livelihoods, and specifes the concept of wellbeing as one that can usefully and practically build bridges between fsheries stakeholders with diverse interests. The chapter then examines two assessments of fsheries on community wellbeing: the social and economic impacts of fsheries in Australia, and the effects of governance on wellbeing of fshing communities in Indonesia and Solomon Islands.

**Keywords** Fisheries governance • Wellbeing • Relationality

Fishing livelihoods, especially in the Asia-Pacifc, remain hugely signifcant. They produce healthy and nutritious food (Hicks et al., 2019), generate economic opportunities for many millions, play a particularly important role for vulnerable and marginalised groups (Mills et al., 2011) and contribute to the maintenance of traditions and cultures (Allison et al., 2020). Yet, the environmental crises progressively enveloping the globe are particularly acute in the marine systems on which fshing livelihoods depend. Climate change, pollution and overfshing are among the many drivers of change to these marine systems that threaten their capacity to sustainably generate marine resources. At the same time, economic, political and social drivers of change are reshaping the structures of social life that dictate how fshing livelihoods operate. While fshing livelihoods have evolved and adapted to many changes over the years, the accelerating scale and pace of change present signifcant challenges to the very viability of fshing livelihoods in some places. The Asia-Pacifc, home to the largest number of fshers and the most diverse marine ecosystems on the planet, is a crucial locus of these developments (Fig. 5.1).

In much fsheries governance literature, fshers are represented as individuals whose sole objective is to maximise the number of fsh that they catch, with subsequent environmental effects. From this perspective, governance is a balancing act that seeks to maximise the acquisition of fnancial wealth while minimising environmental harms. In contrast, this short book has tried to highlight some of the relationships that drive the perspectives and actions of those working in fsheries value chains. Fishing does not occur in isolation, but takes place in relation to a wider environment of other activities, actors and ideas. We have highlighted three relationships that we argue are particularly important to fshing livelihoods: historical patterns of economic and political change, social identities and relations, and institutional structures. Each, in its own way, is an important part of the nature and character of particular fshing livelihoods and, thus, contributes to the diverse social and ecological outcomes associated with fshing.

While these relationships are usually studied from different conceptual perspectives, or in relative isolation from each other, they are largely complementary (Hornborg et al., 2013). In the Philippines, for example, the cases in this book showed how contemporary class structures in fshing livelihoods derive from historical patterns of political and economic change, intertwine with cultural values relating to inequality and infuence the differentiated outcomes of governance interventions. Some of the key concepts of political ecology introduced in Chap. 1 are useful reminders of the ways in which fshing livelihoods are constituted by these multiple, shifting relationships. Attention to wider scales of analysis and to historical pathways of change, for example, shows how the conditions of fshing livelihoods are generated by broader processes that go well beyond the day-to-day activities of harvesting fsh and other local activities. And recognition that politicised environments (Bryant & Bailey, 1997) are the

**Fig. 5.1** A fsher returns from a night at sea in North-East Palawan, Philippines. (Photo credit: Katherine Jack)

norm rather than unusual shows how the social relationships constituting fshing livelihoods, and the governance interventions that seek to manage them, are experienced in unequal and distinctive ways by different individuals and groups.

This concluding chapter sets out the pragmatic implications of this relational perspective in the applied sphere. When the focus shifts from the act of fshing itself to the wider sets of relationships in which fshing livelihoods are embedded, opportunities for action emerge in new spaces. Understanding fshing in relation to past and present patterns of economic development, in relation to social inequities, and in relation to the social effects of governance regimes, increasingly informs the work of many academics, activists and even those in government. The fundamental role of markets and trade in fshing has led to the formation of new coalitions seeking to harness the power of these markets for improved, more ecologically sustainable growth through the sustainable seafood movement. On the other side of the ideological spectrum, focusing on unequal patterns of economic growth has led to trenchant critiques of the current economic system and its incarnations in 'blue growth' policies (Mallin & Barbesgaard, 2020) or industrial fshing (Longo et al., 2015), as well as advocacy of alternatives such as degrowth (Hadjimichael, 2018) and blue justice (Isaacs, 2019). Similarly, environmentalists draw attention to the enormous costs of our economic system for the environment, in particular for carbon emissions and climate change (Hughes et al., 2017).

At a more micro scale, understanding how patterns of power reproduce themselves in day-to-day interactions and relationships informs much academic and applied social science work on fshing livelihoods. For example, much work on value chains seeks to improve the capacity of fshers to 'upgrade' their position in the value chain, through the development of new skills or access to new technologies (Cole et al., 2018; Purcell, 2014), or access to better market information (Purcell et al., 2017). Increasingly, governments, donors and environmental NGOs are working to address the position of marginalised groups such as women (Barclay et al., 2019; Kleiber et al., 2019; Lawless et al., 2017; USAID Oceans and Fisheries Partnership, 2019). The issue of working conditions and rights among fshers, particularly those working on industrial fshing vessels, is now prompting governments and corporations to address these issues (Kittinger et al., 2017).

Attention to the relationships between fshing livelihoods and institutions, particularly institutional inequities, also informs much social science work and activism, and has driven change in dominant models of fsheries governance. Attention to the role and rights of communities was one of the major drivers behind co-management, for example, which has been adopted in various ways in many parts of the Asia-Pacifc (Ratner et al., 2012). Similarly, in many contexts state models of fsheries governance must work with customary marine tenure and access rules (Rohe et al., 2019). A focus on the rights of fshers has led to the development of the Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries, and a thriving coalition of groups advocating for greater visibility and support for small-scale fshers (Jentoft, 2019).

In the remainder of this chapter, we return to the theme of wellbeing introduced in Chap. 1 and discuss some of the practical ways in which this concept can be operationalised and used to contribute towards better ecological and social outcomes. The concept of wellbeing is no panacea (Young et al., 2018) or blueprint (Ratner & Allison, 2012); it is not a new model for governance that can be expected to work effectively in the same way in every context. However, one of the strengths of the wellbeing concept is its ability to bridge between different stakeholders involved in fsheries governance and scholarship.

For many fsheries policymakers and managers, the fndings of social scientists (e.g., detailed ethnographic investigations) are often 'interesting' but ultimately diffcult to operationalise, 'unscientifc', or 'a bit touchy feely', as one prominent fsheries scientist advised author Fabinyi at a technical workshop. Conversely, for many social scientists, such as anthropologists fascinated by the complexities and contradictions in human societies, the tendency in many economic models and in much fsheries policy to discuss fshers in terms of numbers (catch, value, volume, number of fshers, etc.) is a gross simplifcation of underlying key social processes and structures. So often, the debates between economists, policymakers and social scientists become 'bogged down' in sterile and unproductive arguments because of these fundamentally different assumptions about knowledge. Wellbeing, we argue, is a concept that can help to incorporate some of the complex issues addressed by social scientists in a way that can be recognised, understood and acted on by fsheries policymakers. It is useful for exploring the interrelated environmental, political and economic aspects of fsheries.

One reason the wellbeing approach is useful for bringing together disparate knowledge systems is that it addresses a shared high-level goal: the wellbeing of human communities (Stiglitz et al., 2018). Using fsheries resources for the beneft of the people is usually the overarching aim stated in fsheries legislation, so it is clearly in the purview of fsheries managers. The conceptualisation of wellbeing most often used in fsheries draws from development studies, adapted from Amartya Sen's capabilities approach (Sen et al., 1987). It is described as 'a state of being with others, which arises where *human needs are met*, where one can act meaningfully to pursue one's goals, and where one can enjoy a satisfactory quality of life' (McGregor 2008, cited in Coulthard et al., 2011: 79).

Another reason the wellbeing approach enables participation from across disciplines is that it is a framework, rather than a method itself. Various methods are used, often mixed to gain a comprehensive picture (McGregor et al., 2015), such as qualitative interviews, social psychological tools (Britton & Coulthard, 2013; Coulthard et al., 2014), semiquantitative questionnaires, economic analysis (Voyer et al., 2017) and ecosystem services methods (Chaigneau et al., 2019; Masterson et al., 2019). Thus, people from different disciplinary perspectives are usually able to see some kind of method they recognise as rigorous and appropriate in wellbeing studies. The holistic emphasis in wellbeing studies means that different domains of life are examined—from straightforward economic benefts to political relationships.

Wellbeing has been used to assess the condition of fshing communities (Britton & Coulthard, 2013; Coulthard et al., 2011, 2014; Smith & Clay, 2010) as well as the human dimensions in ecosystem-based resource management (e.g., Breslow et al., 2016). These uses of the wellbeing approach involve asking the question, 'what is the wellbeing of community *x*?' For example, the University of Canberra runs annual wellbeing surveys of rural areas in Australia, using established psychological questionnaires for individual and community wellbeing, enabling comparison across regions, across demographic groups in populations, and over time.1 It has been used to compare the wellbeing of fshers against the rest of the population (Barclay et al., 2020).

Wellbeing has also been used to assess effects on communities. These uses involve asking the question, 'what are the effects of *y* on the wellbeing of community *x*?' (e.g., measuring the wellbeing benefts people gain from coastal ecosystem services) (Chaigneau et al., 2019; Masterson et al., 2019; McMichael et al., 2005). Thus, wellbeing is a suitable framework for social impact assessments. Other conceptual frameworks used for understanding social impacts in fshing communities include resilience and vulnerability. There are some examples of ongoing monitoring of social and economic conditions in relation to marine ecosystems; although, these do not use a wellbeing framework (i.e., the Social and Economic

<sup>1</sup> Information about the Australian Regional Wellbeing Survey is available at https://www. canberra.edu.au/research/institutes/health-research-institute/regional-wellbeing-survey/ survey-results

Long-Term Monitoring Program for the Great Barrier Reef in Australia,2 and the collection of data on social indicators for coastal and ocean ecosystems across the US) (Ramenzoni & Yoskowitz, 2017). A study in Bangladesh showed the effects of different types of aquaculture through comparing the wellbeing of a village engaged in rearing tiger shrimp with another village rearing freshwater prawn (Belton, 2016). The wellbeing approach has also been used to specifcally assess the effects of fsheries on community wellbeing. The following cases examine two such assessments.

## Social and Economic Effects of Fisheries in Australia

There have been two large evaluations of the effects of fsheries on the wellbeing of communities in Australia, for the states of New South Wales (Voyer et al., 2016, 2017) and Victoria (Abernethy et al., 2020). The impetus for these studies was the lack of public and government support for fsheries in Australia noted in Chap. 4. Fishing industry bodies felt that robust evidence about the positive effects fsheries have on communities where fshing occurs would help their advocacy efforts to improve public perceptions about fsheries, and ensure continued access to fsheries resources.

The studies involved a two-step process. First, the areas of community life or domains of wellbeing to which fsheries can contribute were identifed, through the literature on wellbeing and qualitative interviews with fshers and others in fshing communities. Second, the specifc contributions fsheries can make to those areas of community life were identifed (see Table 5.1). These contributions were investigated through a mix of qualitative interviews, document review, a semi-quantitative phone survey, and economics analysis, including contributions to regional economies using input–output methods.

Since wellbeing is multidimensional (McGregor et al., 2015; Stiglitz et al., 2018), fsheries contributions were considered as having material, subjective and relational dimensions. Material contributions are easy to understand—they include food, income and assets, access to services, and environmental quality. Fisheries contributions to subjective wellbeing are effects on people's perceptions of their quality of life and the values and

<sup>2</sup>The Social and Economic Long-Term Monitoring Program data for the Great Barrier Reef are available at https://data.csiro.au/dap/landingpage?pid=csiro:38797


**Table 5.1** Fisheries-relevant domains of community wellbeing, and fsheries contributions to those domains

Source: Abernethy et al. (2020)

beliefs that shape their levels of satisfaction, such as whether they feel it is a good thing to be eating locally produced seafood or believe that fshers are operating in ways that sustain the marine environment. Relational aspects include whether fshers contribute to the development and maintenance of relationships that enable communities to achieve wellbeing, such as through donating to or volunteering in community activities like sports or festivals, or through business and political connections that may beneft communities.

The picture of fsheries that emerges from a wellbeing analysis really illuminates livelihoods. Before these studies were conducted the only existing data were statewide fsheries' gross value of production (i.e., volume of catch multiplied by beach price), and rough job numbers from census data. The wellbeing economic analysis expanded the view to consider businesses supplying services and gear to fshers, as well as the fowon to businesses in seafood processing and wholesaling. The input–output method estimated the level of economic activity fshing generated in regions, down to local government areas, as well as the proportion of this going to household incomes, and the numbers of jobs in fshing, processing and wholesaling.

This kind of material information is certainly useful for making claims about the importance of fshing to communities, but the multidimensional mixed-methods approach greatly deepened the understanding generated. For example, the qualitative interviews and phone survey revealed the close connections between fsheries and tourism—another key economic activity in many fshing communities. It is not just that the two sectors support each other, but tourism in many locations is seasonal whereas fshing is year round, so having fshing as well as tourism is important for local economies. The interviews also revealed that it is not only the numbers of jobs that are important but also the types. Entry-level employment in fsheries is valued in rural areas, because without entry-level work young people have to leave to seek employment elsewhere. Moreover, fsheries work does not require high levels of formal schooling, so it has been a good opportunity for young men who struggled at school or who were 'getting into trouble' and likely heading towards a life of crime and/or welfare dependency.

Finally, looking for contributions to subjective aspects of fshing reveals another element about livelihoods. Some fshers are deeply attached to fshing as a way of life. When they are forced to leave fshing work they become depressed. For these people working on the water, feeling the majesty of the elements and other living creatures, and the satisfaction from surviving and thriving in this work, is about much more than the income they make: it is part of their psychological wellbeing. There is an added layer of importance for Indigenous peoples. Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders gain signifcant and measurable benefts from working on Country, caring for their environment, gaining sustenance from it, sharing food from it and developing and sharing knowledge about it. Therefore, having the opportunity to pursue a livelihood in fshing is about far more than cash income or dietary nutrients—although those material elements are also undeniably important. A wellbeing approach examining relational and subjective, as well as material dimensions, gives a holistic picture of the effects fshing has on communities.

## Effects of Governance on Wellbeing of Fishing Communities in Indonesia and Solomon Islands

A slightly different tack was taken in looking at the wellbeing contributions of tuna fsheries to coastal communities in Indonesia and Solomon Islands (McClean et al., 2019). The impetus for this study was a defcit in existing fsheries governance analyses. Around the world the overarching objective for fsheries management enshrined in fsheries legislation is almost always to beneft society, but fsheries management science virtually never considers the social or economic benefts from fsheries in a systematic way: fsheries management science is usually about fsh stocks. Sometimes there is an economic element such as 'maximum economic yield' or bio-economic modelling—both of which often focus on fshing business proftability—or more basic information about contribution to national GDP, gross value of production or total numbers of jobs. Each of these approaches is 'broad brush' and does not give the fne-grained, multidimensional understanding of economic effects achieved in the Australian studies using a wellbeing approach. Non-economic social benefts are rarely examined in fsheries science at all.

Therefore, the project asked the question, 'what are the effects of different types of fsheries governance on the wellbeing generated through tuna fsheries in coastal communities?' The stages involved in answering this question included identifying (1) the fsheries-relevant domains of wellbeing in Indonesia and Solomon Islands contexts; (2) the contributions tuna fsheries make to those domains; (3) the types of governance affecting those contributions; and (4) the effects those forms of governance have on wellbeing contributions from tuna fsheries. 'Governance' here is understood broadly to include all social, economic and political institutions shaping fsheries, as well as specifc fsheries regulations, as per insights from governance studies (Kooiman et al., 2005). For example, private sector interventions such as certifcation for MSC and fair trade and differential access to markets are part of governance.

The scope of this project precluded economic analysis or large-scale questionnaire data collection. It relied on qualitative interviews (134 across both countries) and review of documents, and existing social, economic and fsheries data. It would be useful to also have quantitative social and economic data and analysis. At the time of writing the researchers were pursuing this in subsequent research.

However, even without quantitative data or analysis the qualitative wellbeing analysis produced an approach for assessing governance that can help fsheries managers and stakeholders start to grasp the implications of different governance interventions for the wellbeing of target communities. Table 5.2 outlines a framework that can be used to conduct a 'frst pass' assessment that can help illuminate likely social and economic effects of a governance intervention. This framework can also highlight


**Table 5.2** Framework for assessing fsheries governance in terms of community wellbeing

Source: McClean et al. (2019)

knowledge gaps, both to orient future research efforts to provide better data and quantitative analysis, and improve the evidence base. For example, this includes household incomes coming from tuna industries, numbers and types of jobs, which social groups have which types of jobs, and contributions to regional economies, among other factors. Ideally, there should be ongoing monitoring of social and economic aspects of fsheries, so that social and economic factors can become part of routine fsheries science, and so that data are available for when social and economic impact assessments are needed.

The main areas of wellbeing beneft that emerged in the project were economy and livelihoods, food and nutritional security, and environmentally sustainable fsheries. Tuna industries give rise to formal and informal employment and large and small business opportunities in fshing, trading and processing, as well as in supplying inputs and services for fshing and processing. Indonesian Government statistics on fsheries employment do not break down the numbers for tuna, but it is a prominent part of the economy in many coastal areas. For example, in the tuna port of Bitung in North Sulawesi, in 2018 there were over 8000 people employed in fshing and processing, with many more working in supply chains for markets in the regions surrounding Bitung (McClean et al., 2019). In Solomon Islands the tuna fshing and processing sector based in Noro in Western Province has long been the largest private sector employer in the country. It formally employed around 2400 people in 2018, and has long been a large employer of women, who work on the processing lines (McClean et al., 2019). In addition, there are hundreds of people doing small-scale tuna fshing and selling tuna in urban markets, both catch from the smallscale fsheries and rejects from the industrial fsheries. The cannery in Noro, which has a canteen for its workers, buys fresh vegetables from around 500 farmers in the surrounding area (McClean et al., 2019).

The subjective aspects of livelihoods were given less weight by interviewees than in the Australian studies, possibly due to the different situations of Indonesia and Solomon Islands as developing countries. Interviewees were mainly concerned with the material dimensions of livelihoods. Nevertheless, the broad view of the wellbeing approach—paying attention to relational and subjective dimensions, as well as material and the use of qualitative methods—helped develop a holistic picture of livelihoods. The two key fndings about tuna livelihoods that emerged from this study were the workplace health and safety and income insecurity risks that are involved in some livelihoods, and the distribution of different livelihood opportunities across groups within society, particularly in relation to socio-economic status, ethnicity and/or migrant status, and gender.

The quality of many tuna livelihoods in Indonesia and Solomon Islands is greatly affected by security of income as well as workplace health and safety. Indonesian fshing crews are largely informally recruited: they have no contract, insecure catch-share models of remuneration and little health insurance coverage. There are injuries working with heavy equipment at sea, and crews of small-scale fshing vessels are sometimes lost. Indonesian tuna fshing crews are often among those found to be suffering human rights abuses through poor labour conditions, and even forced labour. In contrast, formal sector workers in processing factories are contracted, have minimum wage conditions, and are usually covered by various forms of social and health insurance. In Solomon Islands working conditions on vessels in the domestic feet are some of the best in the region. Formal tuna processing work is similar in conditions and protections to Indonesia. Informal fshing, processing and trading work are likewise more insecure, without insurance protection, and small-scale fshing is similarly dangerous, with crew occasionally lost at sea.

The incomes for entry-level work in both Indonesia and Solomon Islands, in both formal and informal sectors, are very low, often around the poverty line—although this is not always the case. For example, Solomon Islands women cooking and selling tuna informally in markets make a great deal more than cannery workers. Financial literacy also makes a big difference in Solomon Islands, with some small-scale fshers and cannery workers who have had fnancial literacy training able to make their incomes go a lot further than others in terms of housing, covering weekly household expenses and so on. In Indonesia, some petty traders have worked their way up into running lucrative businesses (McClean et al., 2019).

Thus, entry-level tuna industry work in Indonesia is mainly flled by low socio-economic status groups. Often, this corresponds with migrant status, which can mean internal migration within Indonesia, such as Butonese fshers operating in Maluku. In Bitung there are many different internal migrants drawn by the availability of tuna work, and there has historically been a strong presence of Filipino fshers in Bitung. The Butonese people fshing in Maluku are marginalised and tuna fshing is one of the only options available to them. In Solomon Islands remuneration in the tuna sector is on par with other sectors, so formal tuna work is sought by people from all groups in society. However, small-scale tuna fshing does align with low socio-economic or migrant status. The reasons for this are complicated and include the fact that people with I-Kiribati heritage have more skills and knowledge in offshore fshing than most Indigenous Solomon Islanders, but according to interviewees also include the marginalised status of people who migrated from Kiribati. More research would be needed to observe whether tuna livelihoods act to alleviate poverty, or if the low incomes keep marginalised people in low socioeconomic situations.

Another clear social differentiation in tuna livelihoods is by gender. Tuna fsheries are some of the more male-dominated fsheries, and very few women are engaged in tuna fshing in Solomon Islands or Indonesia. However, women are heavily involved in processing and trading. In formal processing women in both countries make up the majority of workers on tuna 'cleaning' lines, preparing the tuna meat for putting in cans. They work in administration, management and technical roles in processing factories. Women as well as men are also involved in informal trade of tuna and small-scale processing such as smoking or cooking tuna for sale. However, in both countries, men tend to cluster around the larger, highervalue parts of business, with women correspondingly clustered around smaller-scale, lower-value activities and lower-authority positions. Therefore, livelihood opportunities in tuna industries in both countries are shaped by gender as well as ethnicity and socio-economic status.

## Conclusion

Fishing livelihoods currently face a series of profound and interrelated economic, environmental and social challenges that negatively affect and threaten their viability. While these challenges are increasingly well understood—from climate change to overfshing, and from new government regulation to increasing competition over marine and inland fsheries resources with other economic sectors—the solutions to these challenges are much harder to encounter. This refects the reality that fsheries and coastal governance is inherently a 'wicked problem'—one where there are many dynamic factors and stakeholders, where there are no technical solutions and where it is not even clear when the problem is 'solved' (Jentoft & Chuenpagdee, 2009).

The fnal chapter of this book discussed how the wellbeing approach can help to shift the dominant focus in fsheries governance and policymaking from economic benefts and environmental effects alone, to one that considers the wider relations by which fshing livelihoods are shaped. A wellbeing approach as described in this chapter can reveal the different dimensions of wellbeing to which fshing livelihoods contribute, and how fsheries managers and stakeholders can assess the consequences of specifc governance interventions for the wellbeing of fshing communities. Fishing livelihoods will continue to change in relation to the wider world of which they are part. Understanding and incorporating these relationships into the knowledge informing decision-making is one way that the wider fsheries policymaking and management community can ultimately contribute to the improvement and sustainability of fshing livelihoods.

## References


**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

## Index1

#### **A**

Aquaculture, 12, 24, 33, 38, 56, 97 Australia, 12, 14, 66, 67, 71–76, 96–99

**B** Blue economy, 1, 6, 81

#### **C**

Certifcation, 6, 79, 81, 100 China Chinese market for seafood, 4 Class, 45–53, 92 Climate change, 5, 37, 92, 94, 104 Co-management, 67, 70, 79, 81, 94 Customary marine tenure, 6, 66, 94

#### **D**

Development, 2, 4, 9, 25, 35, 38, 47, 48, 67, 71–73, 79, 92, 94, 95, 98 Distant water fshery, 25–26, 77

#### **E**

Ecosystem-based fsheries management (EBFM), 6, 68, 70 Ethnicity, 4, 45, 47, 58, 67, 102, 104

## **F**

Fisheries governance, 1–14, 38, 58, 65–81, 92, 94, 95, 100, 101, 104 industrial, 4, 26, 46, 77, 102 management, 7, 54, 58, 67–74, 76–79, 81, 100, 105 small-scale, 2, 3, 7, 8, 24, 28, 29, 46–49, 66, 67, 74, 75, 77, 79, 81, 95, 102 trade, 24 Food and nutritional security, 102

#### **G**

Gender, 11, 14, 45–48, 53–58, 102, 104 Globalisation, 4, 23–27

1Note: Page numbers followed by 'n' refer to notes.

© The Author(s) 2022 111 M. Fabinyi, K. Barclay, *Asia-Pacifc Fishing Livelihoods*, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79591-7

Governance interactive, 8 neoliberal, 74, 76 private or market-based, 6 public, state or state-based, 6, 66

## **I**

Individual transferable quota (ITQ), 69–71, 73, 74, 79 Indonesia, 12, 14, 58, 66, 67, 76–80, 99–104 Institutions, 31, 46, 48, 58, 66, 67, 70, 71, 80, 81, 94, 100

## **J**

Japan colonialism, 24, 25 distant water fshery, 77 expansion, 24–26 Japanese market for seafood, 26–27 Papua New Guinea, 24, 26, 76 The Western Philippines, 26

#### **L**

Livelihood fshing livelihood, 1–14, 23–27, 30, 33, 34, 36–38, 45–48, 65, 70, 71, 75, 81, 91–105 relational approach to, 11, 14 sustainable livelihoods approach (SLA), 9, 10

#### **M**

Market-based fsheries governance, 70 Milne Bay, 36, 37 Mindoro, 12, 12n3, 27, 28, 33, 49

#### **N**

Neoliberalism, 68–70 New South Wales, 12, 74, 75, 97

#### **P**

Palawan, 12, 12n3, 27, 28, 31–33 Papua New Guinea (PNG), 12, 14, 24, 26, 33–38 Pelagic fsh, 49 Philippines, 5, 12, 14, 24, 26–34, 28n1, 37, 38, 48, 50–52, 67, 92, 93 Political ecology, 10, 11, 46, 92

#### **R**

Regulation, 6, 33, 38, 66, 71, 72, 75, 81, 100, 104 Resource nationalism, 66, 67, 70, 77, 80

#### **S**

Sea cucumbers, 4, 26, 30–33, 35–37, 56, 76 Shell money, 55, 56 Social identity, 11, 48, 92 Solomon Islands, 12, 26, 34, 53–58, 99–104 Sustainable fsheries, 102

#### **T**

Tourism, 2, 7, 33, 38, 99 Tuna, 3, 12, 25, 26, 29, 34, 35, 57, 67, 68, 70, 73, 76–79, 99–104

#### **V**

Value chain, 3, 4, 47, 49, 51, 52, 58, 75, 92, 94 Victoria, 12, 72, 75, 97

#### **W**

Wellbeing, 9–11, 74, 91–105