Biological and ecological mechanisms supporting marine self-governance: The Seri Callo de Hacha Fishery in Mexico

My goal was to describe how biological and ecological factors give shape to fishing practices that can contribute to the successful self-governance of a small-scale fishing system in the Gulf of California, Mexico. The analysis was based on a comparison of the main ecological and biological indicators that fishers claim to use to govern their day-to-day decision making about fishing and data collected in situ. I found that certain indicators allow fishers to learn about differences and characteristics of the resource system and its units. Fishers use such information to guide their day-to-day fishing decisions. More importantly, these decisions appear unable to shape the reproductive viability of the fishery because no indicators were correlated to the reproductive cycle of the target species. As a result, the fishing practices constitute a number of mechanisms that might provide short-term buffering capacity against perturbations or stress factors that otherwise would threaten the overall sustainability and self-governance of the system. The particular biological circumstances that shape the harvesting practices might also act as a precursor of self-governance because they provide fishers with enough incentives to meet the costs of organizing the necessary rule structure that underlies a successful self-governance system.

Institutional and ecological interplay for successful self-governance of community-based fisheries

The goal of this paper is to improve our understanding of the role of institutional arrangements and ecological factors that facilitate the emergence and sustainability of successful collective action in small-scale fishing social-ecological systems. Using a modified logistic growth function, we simulate how ecological factors (i.e. carrying capacity) affect small-scale fishing communities with varying degrees of institutional development (i.e. timeliness to adopt new institutions and the degree to which harvesting effort is reduced), in their ability to avoid overexploitation. Our results show that strong and timely institutions are necessary but not sufficient to maintain sustainable harvests over time. The sooner communities adopt institutions, and the stronger the institutions they adopt, the more likely they are to sustain the resource stock. Exactly how timely the institutions must be adopted, and by what amount harvesting effort must be diminished, depends on the ecological carrying capacity of the species at the particular location. Small differences in the carrying capacity between fishing sites, even under scenarios of similar institutional development, greatly affects the likelihood of effective collective action. © 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Disturbance, response, and persistence in self-organized forested communities: Analysis of robustness and resilience in five communities in Southern Indiana

We develop an analytic framework for the analysis of robustness in social-ecological systems (SESs) over time. We argue that social robustness is affected by the disturbances that communities face and the way they respond to them. Using Ostrom's ontological framework for SESs, we classify the major factors influencing the disturbances and responses faced by five Indiana intentional communities over a 15-year time frame. Our empirical results indicate that operational and collective-choice rules, leadership and entrepreneurship, monitoring and sanctioning, economic values, number of users, and norms/social capital are key variables that need to be at the core of future theoretical work on robustness of self-organized systems. © 2010 by the author(s).