Small-scale fisheries and aquaculture (SSFA) provide livelihoods for over 100 million people and sustenance for ~1 billion people, particularly in the Global South. Aquatic foods are distributed through diverse supply chains, with the potential to be highly adaptable to stresses and shocks, but face a growing range of threats and adaptive challenges. Contemporary governance assumes homogeneity in SSFA despite the diverse nature of this sector. Here we use SSFA actor profiles to capture the key dimensions and dynamism of SSFA diversity, reviewing contemporary threats and exploring opportunities for the SSFA sector. The heuristic framework can inform adaptive governance actions supporting the diversity and vital roles of SSFA in food systems, and in the health and livelihoods of nutritionally vulnerable people-supporting their viability through appropriate policies whilst fostering equitable and sustainable food systems.

For aquaculture to continue along its current growth trajectory and contribute towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, value chains must become more inclusive. Smallholders and other local value chain actors are often constrained by circumstances and market failures in the global aquaculture industry. Integrating these actors into aquaculture value chains through inclusive business models (IBMs) is often touted as a solution to sustainable and ethical trade and business that can generate development outcomes. We reviewed 36 papers under seven business models commonly used in agriculture development to assess their application in aquaculture value chains in lower‐income countries. A global value chain (GVC) analysis is used to unpack the economic and social upgrading objectives of the different IBMs, as well as the types of relational coordination used between actors in the chain to achieve development outcomes. The extent to which these IBMs helped poor actors overcome certain barriers is evaluated with a focus on how they may ensure or be a risk to inclusiveness through the relations and upgrading opportunities evident in their make‐up. The analysis found that the majority of the models focused on economic upgrading over social upgrading. Providing opportunities for the latter is key to achieving the inclusive objectives of IBMs. Greater horizontal coordination between actors can create further opportunities for economic upgrading established under vertical coordination with other nodes upstream and downstream in a value chain. There is a need to further contextualize these models to aquaculture systems and develop clear indicators of inclusiveness.

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The Barotse Floodplain fishery is an important source of livelihood for economically poor women and men in western Zambia. Current efforts by the Department of Fisheries and the traditional authority to manage the fishery can be characterized as weak. The use of unsustainable fishing practices and overfishing are pervasive. Drawing on resilience thinking, we examine the extent to which the existing fishery-dependent livelihood context represents a social-ecological trap, i.e., a process in which rigid and persistent behavioral responses are applied because of a lack of capacity to adapt, leading to overdependence on the fishery, and ultimately, unsustainable outcomes. We use a gender lens and look beyond the primary sector (fishing) to include considerations of a secondary sector (postharvest fish processing) as an important dimension in the social-ecological trap paradigm. We present findings from an empirical research project that tested improved fish processing technologies and a communication for social change innovation as an alternate way to view a possible escape pathway from the trap not commonly recognized in the literature. The results suggest that there is value in adapting the social-ecological trap thinking to include postharvest fish losses and unequal gender relations as drivers of the trap in the floodplain fishery, and that approaches that combine technical innovation to reduce losses with social innovation to improve gender relations may hold promise for enabling fishery-dependent people to shift pathways out of social-ecological traps.

A central claim of community-based adaptation (CBA) is that it increases resilience. Yet, the concept of resilience is treated inconsistently in CBA, obscuring discussion of the limitations and benefits of resilience thinking and undermining evaluation of resilience outcomes in target communities. This paper examines different participatory assessment activities carried out as part of CBA case studies in Timor-Leste and Solomon Islands. The activities and their outputs were assessed against ten characteristics of resilience previously identified in a systematic review. The findings offer support to the claim that CBA can build resilience in target communities, revealing the inherent strengths of CBA in relation to resilience. However, it is necessary for CBA assessments to simultaneously incorporate activities that consider cultural, political, economic and ecological factors influencing resilience within and between communities. This may demand multiple staff with different skills. The findings also highlight the importance of politics and power in shaping adaptive capacity. In particular, addressing the highly context specific nature of social, cultural and political relations demands an approach that is situated in and responsive to local realities. Overall, our case study suggests that using the ten characteristics as an analytical framework offers support to practitioners looking to develop, implement or evaluate CBA assessment activities. Yet within this, it is critical that a focus on increasing resilience through CBA does not preclude transformation in social relations. Realising the potential to support resilience and transformation requires CBA practitioners to acknowledge the multifaceted nature of resilience, whilst also paying close attention to multiple potential barriers to equitable adaptation.

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Technical and social constraints limit value chain actors from equitably engaging in and benefiting from capture fisheries in low-income settings. Extension and development programs often focus on the former, which reflects a technocratic orientation of the fisheries sector and uncertainty about effective ways for development programs to engage with gender and other social constraints. This study presents empirical insights that address these challenges to fisheries development. The study took place in fishing camps in the Barotse Floodplain, Zambia to compare two approaches addressing gender constraints within a broader post-harvest fish loss reduction intervention: an accommodative and a transformative approach. The former embodied a more common 'practical needs' set of strategies to ensure female participation, while the latter comprised a communication tool embedded in an action research process to build critical consciousness. Results indicate that the use of a transformative approach led to significant changes in gender equal attitudes and women's empowerment outcomes compared to only using an accommodative approach. Development programs working in fisheries can apply the findings to engage effectively with gender constraints, especially using transformative approaches to help enable women and men to overcome the social and technical barriers that constrain their lives and livelihoods.

The contribution of seafood to global food security is being increasingly highlighted in policy. However, the extent to which such claims are supported in the current food security literature is unclear. This review assesses the extent to which seafood is represented in the recent food security literature, both individually and from a food systems perspective, in combination with terrestrially-based production systems. The results demonstrate that seafood remains under-researched compared to the role of terrestrial animal and plant production in food security. Furthermore, seafood and terrestrial production remain siloed, with very few papers addressing the combined contribution or relations between terrestrial and aquatic systems. We conclude that far more attention is needed to the specific and relative role of seafood in global food security and call for the integration of seafood in a wider interdisciplinary approach to global food system research.