Gleaning: beyond the subsistence narrative
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RESEARCH
Gleaning: beyond the subsistence narrative Ruby Grantham 1
&
Jacqueline Lau 1,2 & Danika Kleiber 1,2,3
Received: 14 May 2020 / Accepted: 11 September 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Coastal resources are important for the wellbeing and livelihoods of people in coastal communities across the world but are used and valued differently by different people at different times. As such, managing coastal resources equitably requires understanding how and when different people value ecosystems. Gleaning is an important activity in many coastal communities. However, the values of gleaners, and women in general, are often left invisible in coastal ecosystem service assessments and rarely examined in different seasons. Here, we use an exploratory case study to elicit the seasonal values of gleaning to women in a coastal community through an in-depth mixed method case study in Timor-Leste. We found that women gave a variety of instrumental and relational reasons for gleaning and that gleaning values shifted across seasons. Notably, subsistence was not a priority for all gleaners. Instead, there were a diverse range of reasons perceived as important for gleaning including to socialise or to spend time in nature. Our findings highlight the need to move beyond oversimplified understandings of gleaning as simply a matter of meeting basic material needs. The diverse and seasonal value priorities of gleaners in our case study indicate the importance of socially and temporally disaggregated assessments of coastal ecosystem services that account for relational values to support more accurate depictions of coastal livelihoods and equitable management in coastal areas. Keywords Gleaning . Small-scale fisheries . Ecosystem values . Seasonality . Wellbeing . Gender
Introduction Coastal zones are complex social-ecological systems that support the wellbeing of millions of people, many of whom live in the Global South. Accounting for and sustaining the diverse contributions of coastal ecosystems to human wellbeing is thus particularly important, especially in the context of increasingly unpredictable environments (IPCC 2014). Gleaning—the collection of marine organisms predominantly from the littoral zone—is an important livelihood activity for
* Ruby Grantham [email protected] Jacqueline Lau [email protected] Danika Kleiber [email protected] 1
ARC CoE for Coral Reef Studies, James Cook University, Townsville, Australia
2
WorldFish, Penang, Malaysia
3
Present address: Pacific Island Fisheries Science Center, Honolulu, HI, USA
the rural poor in coastal regions of developing countries. Gleaning makes a substantial contribution to catches and food security benefits, particularly in the context of seasonal availability and accessibility of other coastal fisheries (Chapman 1987; Kleiber et al. 2014; Tilley et al. 2020), which are influenced by the spatiotemporal distribution of resources, weather, economic constraints, and regulations (Gill et al. 2019; Sievanen 2014; Teh et al. 2007). Gleaning is a
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