Coevolutionary decoupling in artisanal fisher communities: A temporal perspective from Chile

Abstract

The relationship between the exploitation and scarcity of fishery resources is a complex phenomenon that has been broadly examined by studies on fishing sustainability, the governance of the commons and ecology. This study furthers this line of inquiry using a systemic coevolutionary approach that enables the time perspective to be used to examine the negative effects on artisanal fishing. Through a qualitative methodology, document analysis and ethnographic approach, the research into the coevolution of artisanal fishing in Chile enables us to identify how the negative effects on the fishing communities are the outcome of the gradual increase in the decoupling of local socioecological systems which started in the mid-twentieth century and accelerated within the context of neoliberal capitalism. In this process, the value systems, knowledge, organisation, environment and technology change their ability to integrate with each other, leading to mismatches via successive multiple feedback incidents. From a temporal coupling-decoupling vantage point, a path of analysis opens up to understand the negative effects of the capitalist economic development in traditional fishing communities in the global South.

Introduction

Since the mid-1990s, conditions of fishing practices and communities have attracted increasing interest from academia and policymakers, with a special emphasis on the challenges faced by artisanal fishing communities (Kooiman and Bavinck, 2005) in a context of increasing ocean grabbing (Bennett et al., 2015). Between 1960 and 1990, the worldwide extraction of 20 million tonnes of fishery resources quadrupled (FAO, 2018), radically altering marine ecosystems (Glaría, 2010).

Research on fishery sustainability relates scarcity to a social issue of resource management (Armitage et al., 2017, Armitage et al., 2007; Camus Gayan and Hidalgo Dattwyler, 2017; Camus et al., 2016; Kooiman and Bavinck, 2005; Olson, 2011), overexploitation and ocean grabbing of fishing by big industry and, to a lesser extent, by small-scale fishing using techniques similar to monospecies extraction from the fishing industry (Beitl, 2015; Bennett et al., 2015), and focusing on unequal extraction power (Bennett et al., 2015). Complementary studies based on governance of the commons in fisheries address the problems by advocating the development of collaborative-participatory management and co-management among different public and private actors (Begossi et al., 2011; Trimble and Berkes, 2013), with an emphasis on regulating resource extraction as a way of dealing with the power asymmetry of those with greater extractive technology (Acheson, 2018). Management practices like Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) have enabled the impacts on overexploitation to be managed by means of associations and incentives for protected extraction, and have allowed the species and life of the ecosystems to be conserved (Bladon et al., 2016). In this debate, artisanal activity is identified as important in contributing to feeding the population and balancing the species' reproductive cycles (Kooiman and Bavinck, 2005), as well as being a potential alternative approach to neoliberal resource management, with both positive (Beitl, 2015; Mackenzie, 2001; Ocampo, 2017) and negative results (Begossi et al., 2011).

Co-management (Begossi et al., 2011) as an alternative fisheries practice has incorporated the participation of a wide range of local actors into its approach; however, it has been unable to deal seriously with the socioecological fishing crisis, given that although it does articulate the creation of interesting projects to reactivate traditional fishing through conservation, tourism or protected areas, in practice they seldom take root and achieve generational continuity. It clashes with dynamics of fishery dispossession (Malm and Esmailian, 2012), especially in the global South. It could be argued that because it is centred on resource management, co-management conveys values of economic development to the traditional activity through a neoclassical economic matrix, in which productivity-efficiency and competitiveness underlie the process of sustainable development. Mansfield (Mansfield, 2004) calls it “another neoliberal project” in fisheries, as management becomes a restrictive norm (Schultz, 2015) and a rationalist (Percy and O'Riordan, 2020), calculating (Pinkerton and Davis, 2015) and individualist resource (Acheson, 2018; Olson, 2011).

The commons approach of Ostrom (1990) has also influenced the management of fisheries governance (Kooiman and Bavinck, 2005) by addressing the impacts on resources and those who promote them, in which a variety of actors, the governance system, resource units and interactions-outcomes all come into play. However, this approach is limited to the empirical analysis of management within the governance of fishery resources, making it difficult to adapt it to more complex interpretations of the negative effects on fisheries, changes and transformations over time. Inspired by this interpretation, models like the Social Ecological System (SES) (Basurto et al., 2013; McGinnis and Ostrom, 2014) consider the negative effects on fishery resources while ignoring other factors like the influence of the national economic context on the local one, the deterioration of ecosystems over time and the predominance of certain values in the culture and politics that make what happens in fisheries in the global South different, where the institutions are fragile and at times corrupt. The implementation of regulations controlling extraction via quotas, for example, has been criticised for being a rational tool agreed upon institutionalization through regulations that restrict the traditional activity of fishers, distancing them from their culture and their tradition, which is based on spoken agreements (Blomley, 2016; Castree, 2008; Giordano, 2003).

Unlike governance and commons approaches, by observing affected networks and food chains, ecology focuses on biophysical-chemical properties that lower the availability of resources over time. From the integral ecology approach (Chapin III et al., 2002; Grimm et al., 2008; Redman et al., 2004), Long Term Ecological Resources (LTER) (Kröncke et al., 2019; Lercari et al., 2018) and Local Ecological Knowledge (LEK) generate evolutionary models that provide explanations of the scarcity of fishery resources due to changes associated with variations in climate, ocean temperature, extraction practices and nutrients produced in the food chain over time (Hanazaki, 2003; Santos Thykjaer et al., 2019). Although they integrate the socioecological system and feedback on fishery ecosystems, these studies are limited to explanations of ecological patterns—nutrients, food chain and species—without fully integrating the relationship with social systems (Znachor et al., 2016). These studies have conceptualised some social patterns but the social condition is ultimately not included. As Berkes and Folke (Armitage et al., 2007) and new critical currents (Bakker, 2010; Bresnihan, 2019) point out, the new context of effects on fishing —anchored in sustainability, resource management and FAO reports—requires a complex understanding of local socioecological interactions related to fisheries.

In this article we further the analysis by adapting Norgaard's coevolution model (Ekins and Norgaard, 2006; Gual and Norgaard, 2010) with a systemic lens to study the process of socioecological impacts of artisanal fisheries in two localities in Puchuncaví (Valparaíso, Chile), incorporating a time perspective. This co-evolutionary analysis helps us to recognize multiple incident factors of negative effects on the socioecological system over time, including not only the organisational aspect associated with management and governance but also the ecological patterns addressed by integral ecology. As such, the analysis carried out in this study provides analytical tools to understand the negative effects on fisheries over time by identifying the different interactions that have influenced a process of change and scarcity.