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Fisheries management benefits from the contribution of several academic disciplines, each with their own perspectives, concerns and solutions. In this essay we argue that the contribution of biology, economics, sociology and other relevant disciplines to fisheries would be improved if they originated from broader, more integrated analytical perspectives that are attuned to the empirical realities of fisheries management. Today, disciplinary boundaries narrow the perspectives of fisheries management, creating tunnel vision and standardized technical fixes to complex and diverse management problems. Having worked separately and together for a number of years in fisheries research and consultancy in many parts of the world we, as a group of biologists, economists and sociologists, feel that the time to rid ourselves from disciplinary dogmatism is long overdue. We claim that improvements in fisheries management will be realized not through the promotion of technical fixes but instead by embracing and responding to the complexity of the management problem.2

During the last decade the co-management concept has gained increasing acceptance as a potential way forward to improve fisheries management performance. It has, however, at the same time become increasingly evident that the co-management concept is not clearly defined and means very different things to different people. In this article, we attempt to document experience available from a recent study on fisheries co-management that has researched case studies of various implementations of co-management arrangements in coastal and freshwater fisheries in South East Asia and Southern Africa, and to present a more comprehensive understanding of co-management and to summarise the experiences with both the positive outcomes and the problems in actual implementation.

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