Policies

Increasing the production of food from the ocean is seen as a pathway toward more sustainable and healthier human diets.

This brief provides an update on the status of the Illuminating Hidden Harvests (IHH) study and shares emerging insights on the need for better data collection and analysis, and additional monitoring capacity to improve our collective understanding of small-scale fisheries. This is critical to increasing government attention and improving policy responses and outcomes for the sector.

In Nigeria, like many coastal developing countries, fish is an important source of food for the population, which is currently estimated at 186 million people (World Bank 2016). A recent study estimated that Nigeria ranks third globally for the number of people dependent on coastal fisheries for food and nutrition security, and the demand for fish is growing, alongside growth in population and incomes. However, household fish consumption in Nigeria—measured at 13.3 kg/capita/year—is low compared with the world’s average of 20.3 kg/capita/year (FAO 2018).

Ecosystem services have become a dominant paradigm for understanding how people derive well-being from ecosystems. However, the framework has been critiqued for over-emphasizing the availability of services as a proxy for benefits, and thus missing the socially-stratified ways that people access ecosystem services. We aim to contribute to ecosystem services’ theoretical treatment of access by drawing on ideas from political ecology (legitimacy) and anthropology (entanglement).

Capture fisheries in small island developing states (SIDS) have the capacity to increase access to vital micronutrient-rich food to tackle malnutrition, but when fishers are restricted to nearshore habitats by limited capacity (boats, engines, fishing gear), fisheries production can be low. This is the case of coastal Timor-Leste, where some of the world’s most diverse coral reefs are juxtaposed with one of the world’s most undernourished populations.

Failure to address unsustainable global change is often attributed to failures in conventional environmental governance. Polycentric environmental governance—the popular alternative—involves many centres of authority interacting coherently for a common governance goal. Yet, longitudinal analysis reveals many polycentric systems are struggling to cope with the growing impacts, pace, and scope of social and environmental change. Analytic shortcomings are also beginning to appear, particularly in the treatment of power.