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Abstract:
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"Throughout the 1990s on the Ecuadorian coast, a growing number of local fishing associations began to emerge around sustainability challenges of coastal degradation, mangrove deforestation, and declining catch rates in artisanal fisheries. The spread of shrimp aquaculture provoked mobilizations among advocacy groups and communities experiencing social conflict and displacement from their ancestral fishing grounds within mangrove swamps. Were such forms of collective action an outcome of new social dilemmas associated with rising concerns about environmental degradation and social injustice stirring within the grassroots? How did these concerns become institutionalized in the proliferation of local associations uniting at regional levels within larger networks of “ancestral users of the mangrove”? How and why do such regional alliances encourage new participation among some individuals while disillusioning others? Theories of cultural evolution provide interesting insights about the specific mechanisms by which institutions, cooperative behaviors, and other cultural adaptations emerge and evolve from selective pressures. In this paper, I apply the Cultural Multi-Level Selection framework (Waring et al 2015) to explore these selective pressures in response to dilemmas at different levels of social organization. The paper documents the emergence and spread of over 50 custodias since 2000, which placed over 50,000 hectares of mangroves under the protection and stewardship of nearly 5000 mangrove guardians, thereby providing empirical evidence for understanding the dynamics of governance. The findings suggest that collective action, i.e. the coordinated efforts among individuals, appears to have emerged in response to perceived social dilemmas associated with the rise of shrimp aquaculture on the Ecuadorian coast at the group level; but as alliances across groups emerged at regional scales, such local enthusiasm for collective action may have faded away in some locations. Drawing on interviews with association members, former members and leaders, as well as ethnographic research on mangroves as a social-ecological system in multiple sites throughout the Ecuadorian coast, this paper contributes new empirical insights about the evolution of coastal governance and marine resource management to advance theories of cultural evolution."
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