The central message of the book is that stakeholder participation in the governance of fisheries is beneficial, but confers responsibilities as well as rights: all stakeholders have a public duty to act as stewards of the marine environment. With chapters by leading scholars and participants in fisheries governance, this book recounts contemporary techniques of public participation, and develops a new concept of environmental stewardship as a form of fisheries governance.

During the last decade, there has been a shift in the governance and management of fisheries to a broaderapproach that recognizes the participation of fishers, local stewardship, and shared decision-making.Through this process, fishers are empowered to become active members of the management team,balancing rights and responsibilities, and working in partnership with government. This approach iscalled co-management.This handbook describes the process of community-based co-management from its beginning, throughimplementation, to turnover to the community. It provides ideas, methods, techniques, activities, checklists,examples, questions and indicators for the planning and implementing of a process of community-basedco-management. It focuses on small-scale fisheries (freshwater, floodplain, estuarine, or marine) indeveloping countries, but is also relevant to small-scale fisheries in developed countries and to themanagement of other coastal resources (such as coral reefs, mangroves, sea grass, and wetlands). Thishandbook will be of significant interest to resource managers, practitioners, academics and students ofsmall-scale fisheries.

An interdisciplinary survey addressing the problems of overfishing worldwide, and the best way forward toward good ecological practice and global cooperative governance.

This book is about the ongoing transition of fisheries governance, from top-down command and control towards a more transparent and participatory form. It focuses on the emergence of research practices and advice frameworks that allow co-creation of common knowledge bases for management. Drawing from 8 years of research in GAP, a two-stage 7th framework EU project, the book offers a critical examination of how knowledge practices in fisheries governance are changing. The entry point for this research is a series of practical experiments in the unchartered terrain of collaborative research. To gain insight into the ongoing transition in European fisheries management, GAP initiated and carried out 13 Case Studies in different settings across Europe. In each case study, a team of fishers and marine scientists worked together to identify, plan and implement research projects intended to make a difference. The cases vary. They take on different management issues and shape the collaborations in different ways. The extent to which they succeed in realizing their objectives also differs. They are all contributing important insights into the possibilities of co-creating knowledge for management purposes. The book delves into the individual experiences of each case study as well as the lessons they contribute as a whole. The examination concludes that while research partnerships are not always easy to establish, they are an important step towards better fisheries governance. Without a common knowledge base for fisheries governance, co-created through collaborative research practices, sustainable fisheries will remain out of reach.

Published in 1999, Creative Governance sets out to develop new ideas on the development of Fisheries in Europe. The scholarly and political attention for fisheries in general within Europe is predominantly focused on problems of controlling catch. In this book it is not the problems of harvesting which are taken as the starting point, but opportunities in fisheries as a whole: catch, processing, market and consumption of fish and fish products. The discussion is broadened to include the management of fisheries from the perspective of governance rather than management or policy. Governance is a new and important concept currently being developed in several areas of social science, in this book the governance concept is related to the creation of new opportunities of fisheries in Europe. The combination of these two approaches is not only important for fisheries (in Europe) but also to the governance of natural resources more generally where the shift from a problem to an opportunity and from a management or a governance approach might shed new light and stimulate new actions. The book is the product of close cooperation between scholars from biological, geographical, political science, management studies and anthropological backgrounds.