Governing enclosure for coastal communities: Social embeddedness in a Canadian shrimp fishery

Coastal and Indigenous community access to marine resources and the ocean: A policy imperative for Canada

“…For Indigenous communities in Canada, access to ocean and coastal territories is essential for cultural continuity -including traditional management and harvesting practices, inter-generational transfer of knowledge, and consumption, trade or sale of local and culturally significant species used for food, social and ceremonial (FSC) purposes [28][29][30][31][32]. Access is also important for the political empowerment of those who have claims of adjacency or historical use of the marine environment and resources [7,12,33]. Secure long-term access and retention of benefits is not just about the well-being of coastal communities; it is ultimately a matter of their continuity and survival.…”

“…While research on access in Canada as linked to privatization and rationalization has provided some geographically-situated evidence that these choices are not socially optimal, there is as yet no systematic comparison on the social, economic, ecological, and cultural impact of different access regimes across the country's three coasts. Additionally, work on what social and institutional factors allow for community well-being to persist in spite of privatization is only in its infancy [12,58,88]. Finally, there has been substantially more research on access to fisheries than to other marine resources.…”

“…Finally, there has been substantially more research on access to fisheries than to other marine resources. In addition to licensing regulations and policy programs that have changed the way people access ocean resources, research has also begun to investigate how spatial access is changing in Canada [11,12,89]. This is related to both marine development related activities, such as oil exploration and aquaculture, and also to conservation-related activities, such as marine protected areas (MPAs).…”

“…Coastal and Indigenous communities are an important part of Canada's history, present, and future. Consensus around this important conclusion has emerged from a number of Government of Canada funded research projects, including the Ocean Management Research Network [96], the Coasts Under Stress Project [21], the Community-University Research for Recovery Alliance (CURRA [20]), the Canadian Fisheries Research Network (CFRN [12,26]), the Community Conservation Research Network (CCRN), and the OceanCanada Partnership, as well as other work by various organizations and individual researchers.…”

“…However, barriers to this access are a substantial and growing challenge for many coastal and Indigenous communities around the world [2][3][4][5][6], including in Canada [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]. In this review and policy perspective, we argue that access for coastal and Indigenous communities should be a priority consideration in all policies and decision-making processes related to fisheries and the ocean in Canada.…”