The Role of NGOs in Mexican Small-Scale Fisheries: From Environmental Conservation to Multi-Scale Governance

Abstract

"Multi-scale governance has been widely recommended for effective marine resource management. This approach suggests critical collective decision-making and actions, coupling governance and ecological scales, co-production of knowledge, among other elements. Here, we examine what elements of multi-scale governance are present in Mexican fisheries management and the contribution of NGOs in promoting and implementing this scaling approach to smallscale fisheries management (SSF). We selected three ongoing SSF management processes for our analysis: 1) the establishment of fishing refugia in the Punta San Cosme to Punta Coyote Corridor; 2) implementation of catch shares in the Gulf curvina fishery; and 3) the development of the Fisheries Management Plan (FMP) for the swimming crab fishery. Through case study analysis we show that NGOs in the Gulf of California have moved beyond an environmental agenda and can significantly contribute to fisheries management processes by promoting and improving institutional scales representation, collective and cooperative management, coproduction of knowledge, information sharing, social learning as well as by fortifying the linkages between governance and ecological scales. We observed in all case studies that successful stakeholder collaboration for multi-scale governance will be more feasible to achieve when shared visions and clear procedures are present in management processes. Finally, this work provides a framework to evaluate attributes of multi-scale governance, which can applied to management processes elsewhere."