Co-management and small-scale fisheries in Mexico: the case of a fishers' cooperative in Cedros and San Benito islands

Abstract

In this thesis I employ a common property institutional perspective to evaluate the conditions behind the success of fisheries community-based co-management in small-scale fisheries. Co-management implies that some or all management responsibilities are shared between the government and fishers’ organisations. Co-management has been particularly relevant in small-scale fisheries where communities are greatly involved with, and are highly dependent on their fish resources. However, comanagement implementation is not straightforward because it requires that two important conditions are met. First, the government must be willing to cede power to local groups of fishers by granting them access or use rights. Second, the groups that will receive the power and rights from the government must be well organised and capable of conducting management functions. Following a qualitative research approach, I employ the case of a fishing cooperative —Pescadores Nacionales de Abulón— that harvests abalone and lobster in a group of offshore islands in the central zone of the Baja California peninsula, in Northwest Mexico, to assess whether its co-management arrangement with the government is an effective mechanism for achieving ecological, economic and social sustainability. The empirical findings of this thesis demonstrate that co-management is being effective in promoting sustainable fisheries, while improving the overall well-being of fishers. The most important conditions contributing to co-management success are the harvest rights provided by the government in the form of a concession, and the fact that the recipient of the concession was a wellstructured cooperative that already had a collective-action attitude. This case study demonstrates that fishing cooperatives play an important role in co-management because such organisations have the incentives and capacity to assume management authority and responsibilities, as well as to enforce both government regulations and internal rules. Moreover, the cooperative researched in this thesis brought to light the fact that, provided they have secure and durable harvest rights, cooperatives have the capacity to evolve from organisations that simply harvest resources to business-like organisations that engage in all phases of production, from harvesting to marketing.