Global constraints on rural fishing communities: whose resilience is it anyway?

Abstract

Sustaining natural resources is regarded as an important component of ecological resilience and commonly assumed to be of similar importance to social and economic vitality for resource‐dependent communities. However, communities may be prevented from benefiting from healthy local resources due to constrained economic or political opportunities. In the case of Alaskan wild salmon, the fisheries are in crisis due to declining economic revenues driven by the proliferation of reliable and increasingly high‐quality products from fish farms around the world. This stands in contrast with many of the world's wild‐capture fisheries where diminished biological abundance has led to fishery collapse. Furthermore, increasing efficiency of salmon farm production, globalization, and dynamic consumer preferences, suggests that the wild salmon industry will continue to be challenged by the adaptability, price and quality of farmed salmon. Conventional responses to reduced revenues by the wild‐capture industry have been to increase economic efficiency through implementing a range of entry entitlement and quota allocation schemes. However, while these mechanisms may improve economic efficiency at a broad scale, they may not benefit local community interests, and in Alaska have precipitated declines in local ownership of the fishery. To be viable, economic efficiency remains a relevant consideration, but in a directionally changing environment (biological, social or economic), communities unable to procure livelihoods from their local resources (through access or value) are likely to seek alternative economic opportunities. The adopted strategies, although logical for communities seeking viability through transformation in a changing world, may not be conducive to resilience of a ‘fishing community’ or the sustainability of their wild fish resources. We use a theoretically grounded systems approach and data from Alaska's Bristol Bay salmon fishery to demonstrate feedbacks between global preferences towards salmon and the trade‐offs inherent when managing for the resilience of wild salmon populations and human communities at different scales.

Resilient Salmon, Resilient Fisheries for British Columbia, Canada

“…As a result, the salmon fisheries, like the species, have become less resilient (Martin 2008). If salmon harvests are to provide income and cultural sustenance to fishing communities in the future, community development must go hand in hand with fishery management (Robards and Greenberg 2007). I suggest a number of institutional and policy reforms to promote salmon and fishing community resilience based on the pro-resilience practices listed in Table 2 (see also Hanna 2008).…”

Sustaining Sanak Island, Alaska: A Cultural Land Trust

“…Robards and Greenburg [67] argue that village sustainability is more about flexibility and the ability to reinvent cultural and economic identities as markets change, village compositions change, resource abundances shift, and resource management evolves. Villages in the Aleutians are rapidly changing alongside fisheries and climate because of population declines, energy resource development, health challenges, and changes in subsistence and commercial fisheries access.…”

How Resilient Are Europe’s Inshore Fishing Communities to Change? Differences Between the North and the South

“…Fisheries SESs are resourcedependent systems in which humans participate as resource users (or extractors). As such, humans often deal with declining resources and increasing controls, in addition to facing socio-demographic disadvantages (Pauly et al 1998;Robards and Greenberg 2007). Institutional solutions to fisheries resource problems among European Union (EU) Member States are dealt with at different levels (EU and national), with the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) providing the umbrella framework for top-down control of fisheries resources at the EU level.…”

“…However, if a system is highly adapted to a range of variability through specialized institutions it can be more vulnerable to new unknown changes (Nelson et al 2007). In order to sustain such systems, it is important to understand these dynamics as they not only face predictable and well-understood variations, but also unpredictable temporal variations in social and natural variables (Folke et al 2005;Janssen et al 2007;Robards and Greenberg 2007).…”

“…2 However, the subsidies given by the EU and the way these subsidies are distributed distort the economic landscape of fisheries without addressing the underlying issues such as the overcapacity of the sector (Robards and Greenberg 2007).…”