Commentary 1 to the Manifesto for the Marine Social Sciences: fisheries
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COMMENTARY
Commentary 1 to the Manifesto for the Marine Social Sciences: fisheries Nathalie A. Steins 1 & Hilde M. Toonen 2 & Alyne E. Delaney 3,4 Published online: 3 July 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Fisheries have long dominated the agenda of marine social sciences. For most of the twentieth century, studies tended to focus on ethnographies of fishing communities and case studies of local management, and often located in the Global South. Research activities were fragmented, remained academic, and had little impact on policy (Symes et al. 2019). The last 25 years witnessed changes, with increasing focus on fisheries management studies in the Global North, and a growing, yet sometimes hesitant, recognition from policy-makers that social sciences have an important role to play in showing interactions between marine policies on the one hand and fishers’ behaviour, compliance, communities and heritage on the other (Symes and Hoefnagel 2010; Urquhart et al. 2011). At the same time, significant changes are taking place in terms of marine use, with coastal and offshore waters no longer being the exclusive domain of fishers. Nature conservation and development, land reclamation, tourism, aquaculture, shipping, mineral extraction and, more recently, renewable energy production particularly through offshore wind farms are putting increasing stress on the oceans, on traditional users and on governance. So does climate change. Considering the current focus on Blue Growth or the Blue Economy (Arbo et al. 2018; Mulazzani and Malorgio
* Nathalie A. Steins nathalie.steins@wur.nl Hilde M. Toonen hilde.toonen@wur.nl Alyne E. Delaney ad@ifm.aau.dk 1
Wageningen Marine Research, Wageningen University and Research, PO Box 68, 1970 AB IJmuiden, The Netherlands
2
Environmental Policy Group, Wageningen University and Research, Hollandseweg 1, 6677 PC Wageningen, The Netherlands
3
CNEAS, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan
4
Centre for Blue Governance, Aalborg University, Rendsburggade 14, 9000 Aalborg, Denmark
2017), we fully concur with the Manifesto’s statement that marine social science should go beyond fisheries (MMSS 1.1.4). Nevertheless, there still seems to be a bias towards fisheries social science, with one full paragraph dedicated to fisheries (MMSS 1.2) and fisheries also receiving special attention in the section on governance (MMSS 2). This suggests—and we concur—that fisheries remain an important topic for the marine social science agenda, with a broad scope of themes. Social scientists should continue studying fisheries in relation to ‘traditional topics’ such as their contribution in shaping identities of individuals and communities, resilience, livelihoods, heritage, resilient coastal communities, and formal and informal governance systems. They should also focus on lesser studied topics, such as the role of women, food security related to fisheries, impacts of market-based approaches, the (future) role of family businesses, fisheries and marine spatial planning, and fishing and climate change, as suggested in the Man
