ReACTion – synthesis of results

How do fishers adapt to increasing variability and scarcity in fish resources (including regime shifts and uncertainty), and how are these adaptive responses shaped by community characteristics such as degree of resource dependence and income distribution?

Background

Small-scale fisheries (SSFs) abound mostly in developing countries throughout the tropics but are nevertheless important contributors to nutrition, food security, sustainable livelihoods and poverty alleviation across the globe. Climate change is expected to lead to increasing resource scarcity and fish stock variability. Because of climate change, tropical marine systems are more likely to undergo so-called regime shifts; abrupt, and potentially persistent changes in their structure and function. In addition, many SSFs are already threatened by overexploitation stemming from open access regimes and weak governance. In light of this, it is a critically important task to map out and increase our understanding about behavioural strategies adopted by small-scale fishers for dealing with some of the challenges described above.

Research questions

This research project set out to answer the following research questions:

1. How do fishers that crucially depend on availability of fish respond to and deal with an increasing resource variability (including e.g., regime shifts) and associated uncertainties?
2. How do fishers that crucially depend on the availability of fish respond to and deal with increasing resource scarcity?
3. Can we see behavioural differences depending on the type of fishing community (e.g., w.r.t. various degrees of resource dependency and income distribution)?

We have answered these research questions using a multimethod approach, combining behavioural experiment, interviews and observational data.

Results

Our behavioural experiments with resource users show that so called regime shifts and sudden drop in resource availability can be averted by resource users (e.g., small-scale fishers) if it is in their own power (i.e. not only externally driven events) and given that they can communicate and device exploitation strategies together (see Schill et al 2023, Lindahl and Jarungrattanapong 2023). We thereby confirm earlier results found in a lab setting with students as experimental participants.

Another result is that the extent to which resource users manage to avoid such drastic drops in resource availability also depends on the nature of the uncertainty around the resource dynamics (Schill et al 2023) and moreover on the context in which these users live. For example, results by Schill et al (2023) find that community-level factors (such as education level, proximity to markets) influence exploitation. Lindahl and Jarungrattanapong (2023) find that over-exploitation is driven by individual characteristics, e.g., if they can diversify income, and if they are born outside the village. Moreover, results by Lindahl et al (2021) show that whether resource users can diversify income can influence behavior in a non-linear way. Under no scarcity, resource dependent fishers exploit more cautiously compared to less resource dependent fishers whereas under moderate resource scarcity they exploit more aggressively. Under severe scarcity there is no difference in behaviour between the two types of fishers, both types exploit quite cautiously.

Another result of the project is that policy intervention in the form of extraction quotas can further improve resource management (Ntuili et al 2023). The results make the case that more systematic explorations of the role of socio-economic factors, and how these factors interact with ecological conditions are needed if we want to fully understand drivers of resource users facing increasing resource scarcity and variability. Our work can be seen as one step in this direction.

A result of this project is the adaptions, and evaluations of an existing experimental design in field settings. This allows for further investigations e.g., additional data collection from cases and places that differ in terms of economic, cultural, and ecological contexts, which in turn can advance our understanding on behavioral responses of resource users to be better equipped to devise policy strategies that can support long term livelihoods.

Project members

Therese Lindahl (PI) and Caroline Schill from the Beijer Institute, Rawadee Jarungrattanapong Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University in Thailand, and Lina Maria Saavedra-Diaz, University of Magdalena in Colombia.

Funding

Swedish Research Council (#2017-05641)

Research outputs

Schill, C., J. C. Rocha. 2023. Sustaining local commons in the face of uncertain ecological thresholds: evidence from a framed field experiment with Colombian small-scale fishers. Ecological Economics 207:107695. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2022.107695

Ntuli, H., A.-S. Crépin, C. Schill, E. Muchapondwa. 2023. Sanctioned quotas versus information provisioning in community wildlife conservation in Zimbabwe: a framed field experiment approach. Environment and Resource Economics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-023-00759-5

Lindahl, T., R. Jarungrattanapong. 2023. Avoiding catastrophic collapse in small-scale fisheries through inefficient cooperation: evidence from a framed field experiment. Environment and Development Economics 8(2):111–129. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1355770X22000171

Lindahl, T., M. A. Janssen, C. Schill. 2021. Controlled behavioural experiments. Pages 295–306 in G. Biggs et al., editors. The Routledge handbook of research methods for social-ecological systems. Routledge, New York, USA.

Lindahl, T., C. Schill, R. Jarungrattanapong. 2021. The role of resource dependency for sharing increasingly scarce resources: evidence from a behavioural experiment with small-scale fishers. Beijer Discussion Paper Series 276. Available online at https://www.beijer.kva.se

Lindeberg Goni, M., J. Clark. 2018. Exogenous change in the regeneration of a common pool resource and its effect on cooperation and efficiency. Bachelor thesis in economics. Stockholm School of Economics, Department of Economics, Stockholm, Sweden. Available online at https://hhs.primo.exlibrisgroup.com