CoopeTarcoles R.L is a cooperative on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica that has obtained better conditions for its members in the context of small-scale sustainable fisheries for over thirty years. Documents from the cooperative and interviews with diverse stakeholders provided information on the catalytic factors that have made CoopeTarcoles R.L advance towards small-scale fisheries sustainability. A political framework provided by the State concerned with social welfare, the adaptation of the organizational cooperative model to local needs and a community-based governance model for fishery management have been crucial in this regard. Information gathered shows that this collective enterprise has been able to create alternative and gender balanced sources of employment, lead environmental and ecosystem improvement and obtain better prices for fishery products across its three decades of existence. The cooperative, being a local, collective and inclusive initiative, has turned into an engine for community sustainable development, recognizing the value of small-scale fishers' identity and its importance for the well being of the area. Several factors combined to be crucial for the long-term vision of the fishers in the cooperative and their successful path towards sustainable development. This study highlights the initial support of the government for the creation of a collective organization with adequate infrastructure, the structural changes that led to responsible fishing being promoted by the recognition of a Marine Responsible Fishing Area, and the more equitable relationships supported 15 years ago by another cooperative (CoopeSoliDar R.L.) dealing with human rights and marine conservation.
Recognizing two decades of failure to achieve global goals and targets, parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity are in the final phase of negotiating a Post‐2020 Global Biodiversity Framework for the conservation, sustainable use and benefit sharing of biodiversity. The framework attempts to set out pathways, goals and targets for the next decade to achieve positive biodiversity change. This perspective intends to help that framework set people firmly as part of nature, not apart from it. Despite work done so far through four meetings, new thinking and focus is still needed on ‘what’ changes must be conceptualized and implemented, and ‘how’ those changes are to be delivered. To help achieve that new thinking, as a broad range of people, many with a focus on aquatic systems, we highlight six key foci that offer potential to strengthen delivery of the framework and break the ‘business as usual’ logjam. These foci are as follows: (i) a reframing of the narrative of ‘people's relationship with the rest of nature’ and emphasize the crucial role of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities in delivering positive biodiversity change; (ii) moving beyond a focus on species and places by prioritizing ecosystem function and resilience; (iii) supporting a diversity of top‐down and bottom‐up governance processes; (iv) embracing new technologies to make and measure progress; (v) linking business more effectively with biodiversity and (vi) leveraging the power of international agencies and programmes. Given they are linked to a greater or lesser degree, implementing these six foci together will lead to a much‐needed broadening of the framework, especially those of business and broader urban civil society, as well as those of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.
Marine spatial planning (MSP) now has a sufficient history for consideration of the way in which MSP processes are developing over time, gaining experience and responding to issues that arise. Rather than setting a study of this kind in the well-established framework of adaptive management, I choose instead a spatial concept that allows planning action to be more closely meshed with the nature of the marine setting itself, that of Deleuze and Guatarri's notion of striated and smooth spaces. This suggests that there are two different manners in which space is produced, which are interdependent and interchanging and work together in making progress; this has certain resonances with the materiality of the sea. I use this concept in a reading of an MSP process with a relatively long pedigree, that of the Shetland Islands, Scotland, UK, focusing particularly on the development of aquaculture policy, through analysis of a sequence of documents. The study reveals that policy-making is suffused with striated and smooth spatialities, finding expression on the one hand in development criteria and other regulations, and on the other hand, in discretion, negotiation and opportunity-building, with the two yielding to each other and advancing together with their different types of movement. This suggests a more general manner by which MSP processes may progress, by spatial dialectic of this kind, in which those who practice MSP engage through their own reasoning of the natural and human structures and dynamisms of the coasts and seas and their responsive plan-making.
In Costa Rica, as in other countries, vulnerability and marginalization experienced by small-scale artisanal fishermen, fisherwomen, and mollusk collectors are the result of the absence of a human rights‐based approach to marine conservation and development in the coastal areas. Usually non-formality, absence of tenure and access rights, bad health services, and low education compared to other productive sectors are part of what fisherfolks experience. This commentary shares how working in a long-term and integral way with these communities and incorporating a human rights‐based approach strengthens the contributions that the sector provides toward the sustainable use of the fishing resource of their marine territories with dignity, equity, and justice, especially in the context of SDG 14, the Ocean Decade, and 2022 as the International Year of Artisanal Fisheries and Aquaculture. Born during the COVID pandemic, the initiative of a fair and equitable Sea Market for the fishing products of these small-scale communities supported by CoopeSoliDar RL 1 and the Marine Responsible Fishing areas and marine territories of life network in Costa Rica is today a concrete example of how a fair and just market can contribute positively to the objectives of sustainable development and the fundamental elements contained in the Convention on Biological Diversity, preservation of the natural environment, sustainable use, and fair and equitable distribution of benefits.
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