Conference: Marine Environmental Politics

Conference: Marine Environmental Politics in the 21st Century: MacArthur Program on Multilateral Governance, Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

Paper Abstracts:

A Co-Management Regime for Seri Indian Exclusive Fishing Areas:

Feasibility for the Management of Small-Scale Fisheries with Indigenous People Participation in the Gulf of Mexico

Luis Bourillón
School of Renewable Natural Resources, University of Arizona

Global fisheries' crises have shown that local people are a key component in any effort to manage small-scale fisheries. Co-management is proposed as a new paradigm in fisheries management to ensure sustainable fisheries and local development through the integration of communities into management frameworks. It is assumed that the sharing of management responsibilities and duties by fishers and authorities, will result in higher probabilities of overall success to ensure a sustainable and equitable fishery. But research is needed on how to achieve this integration, since few successful examples exist.

A co-management regime seems particularly appropriate for small communities depending on artisanal fisheries, since usually they exploit local fishing grounds and should benefit from local-level management decisions. It also seems the best strategy in areas where federal governmental fishing authorities have little presence, and in regions where local fishers have a long history of residency and use of marine resources and presumably sophisticated knowledge about the species exploited and their habitats. However, when a co-management system is not present, what conditions are needed for it to arise? It is expected that when the existing management system is highly centralized and authoritarian, the feasibility for a co-management system will be low. Will the feasibility decrease even more if local fishers belong to a minority group, for example an Indian tribe? What roles does the presence of sophisticated local knowledge and traditional management systems play in the implementation process of formalized co-management? What is the influence of foreign market demands in the management ability of local Indian authorities?

I analyzed the current management of small-scale fisheries inside large marine areas reserved for the exclusive use of the Seri Indians -- a small community of 400 in the coast of the Gulf of California in northwest Mexico. Based on a review of the social, economic, political and ecological contexts in Seri territory, and using a model of the legal and administrative framework for fisheries management in Mexico, I contrasted the model with the reality inside Seri exclusive fishing zone, to evaluate the conditions for a co-management system to arise and to prevail. I combined the use of social (ethnographic work) and biological science (fisheries biology) methodologies for the following purposes:

to study the role of local and state institutions in controlling access to Seri exclusive fishing grounds;
to compare spatial and temporal fishing patterns between Seri and non-Seri fishermen, with emphasis on the existence of traditional management systems, based on local knowledge of the ecology of key marine species; and,
to document and analyze current local conflicts over access to fishing areas and their solutions.

See the full paper (password-protected site).

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