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Abstract:
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"To halt degradation of benthic resources in Chile, management
areas (MAs) were set up under the Territorial Use Rights in Fisheries (TURFs)
framework in the late 1990s. Integrated into the global market, MAs have since
expanded along the Chilean coast, involving thousands of small-scale artisanal
fishers. This paper analyses how economic criteria relates to social and ecological
performance of Chilean MAs, by applying TURFs, commons and co-management
theory to two cases: MAs Peñuelas and Chigualoco. To collect and analyse data
Participatory Rural Appraisal tools, interviews and official statistics and reports
were used. Our results show that MAs economic benefits are connected to
fluctuations on the global market. Adapting to changing world market prices then
becomes paramount. TURFs main goal is ecological conservation, but achieving
this seems to depend on meeting fishers livelihoods; failure to do so likely results
in failure to meet conservation objectives. A serious weakness of the Chilean
TURFs system is that it does not pay enough attention to fishers livelihoods or
to the global market context. Furthermore, there is a strong relationship between
good economic benefits and social sustainability. But irrespective of economic
performance, fisher organizations have been empowered and gained increased
resource control with the TURFs system. At policy level, a differentiated and
more flexible system could be more suitable for existing heterogeneous MAs
and their particular economic, social and ecological challenges. For improved
economic sustainability and resource conservation, a system with multiplespecies
managing MAs could be promoted as well. Finally, to enhance theory of commons, co-management and TURFs, we argue for greater acknowledgement of TURFs social benefits in addition to economic assessments. More attention should also be paid to global market conditions of which MAs are dependent and in which they are embedded: macrostructures that are seldom considered in the analyses."
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