How Locally Designed Access and Use Controls Can Prevent the Tragedy of the Commons in a Mexican Small-Scale Fishing Community

The Seri people, a self-governed community of small-scale fishermen in the Gulf of California, Mexico, have ownership rights to fishing grounds where they harvest highly valuable commercial species of bivalves. Outsiders are eager to gain access, and the community has devised a set of rules to allow them in. Because Seri government officials keep all the economic benefits generated from granting this access for themselves, community members create alternative entry mechanisms to divert those benefits to themselves. Under Hardin’s model of the tragedy of the commons, this situation would eventually lead to the overexploitation of the fishery. The Seri people, however, are able to simultaneously maintain access and use controls for the continuing sustainability of their fishing grounds. Using insights from common- pool resources theory, I discuss how Seri community characteristics help mediate the conflict between collective action dilemmas and access and use controls.

Lack of cross-scale linkages reduces robustness of community-based fisheries management.

Community-based management and the establishment of marine reserves have been advocated worldwide as means to overcome overexploitation of fisheries. Yet, researchers and managers are divided regarding the effectiveness of these measures. The "tragedy of the commons" model is often accepted as a universal paradigm, which assumes that unless managed by the State or privatized, common-pool resources are inevitably overexploited due to conflicts between the self-interest of individuals and the goals of a group as a whole. Under this paradigm, the emergence and maintenance of effective community-based efforts that include cooperative risky decisions as the establishment of marine reserves could not occur. In this paper, we question these assumptions and show that outcomes of commons dilemmas can be complex and scale-dependent. We studied the evolution and effectiveness of a community-based management effort to establish, monitor, and enforce a marine reserve network in the Gulf of California, Mexico. Our findings build on social and ecological research before (1997-2001), during (2002) and after (2003-2004) the establishment of marine reserves, which included participant observation in >100 fishing trips and meetings, interviews, as well as fishery dependent and independent monitoring. We found that locally crafted and enforced harvesting rules led to a rapid increase in resource abundance. Nevertheless, news about this increase spread quickly at a regional scale, resulting in poaching from outsiders and a subsequent rapid cascading effect on fishing resources and locally-designed rule compliance. We show that cooperation for management of common-pool fisheries, in which marine reserves form a core component of the system, can emerge, evolve rapidly, and be effective at a local scale even in recently organized fisheries. Stakeholder participation in monitoring, where there is a rapid feedback of the systems response, can play a key role in reinforcing cooperation. However, without cross-scale linkages with higher levels of governance, increase of local fishery stocks may attract outsiders who, if not restricted, will overharvest and threaten local governance. Fishers and fishing communities require incentives to maintain their management efforts. Rewarding local effective management with formal cross-scale governance recognition and support can generate these incentives.

Crowdfunding the Azolla fern genome project: a grassroots approach.

Much of science progresses within the tight boundaries of what is often seen as a "black box". Though familiar to funding agencies, researchers and the academic journals they publish in, it is an entity that outsiders rarely get to peek into. Crowdfunding is a novel means that allows the public to participate in, as well as to support and witness advancements in science. Here we describe our recent crowdfunding efforts to sequence the Azolla genome, a little fern with massive green potential. Crowdfunding is a worthy platform not only for obtaining seed money for exploratory research, but also for engaging directly with the general public as a rewarding form of outreach.

A REPRESENTATIVE OUTSIDER AND THE INCLUSION OF THE OUTSIDER IN ACTS 8:26-40

In Luke’s two volumes, Luke is not interested only in Gentiles and those with high social status but also in the marginalized and those who are outsiders. This dissertation seeks to read Luke’s concern for outsiders and the theme of the inclusion of outsiders in the new kingdom of God in Luke’s narrative of the Ethiopian eunuch’s conversion in Acts 8:26-40. This paper examines the Ethiopian eunuch’s complex identity from the perspectives of the Greco-Roman world, Old Testament (LXX) allusions to the Elijah-Elisha narratives, and Luke’s interpretation of the Isaianic quotation of the Suffering Servant in Acts 8:32-33 (cf. Isaiah 53:7-8). This study pays close attention to the correlations between the theme of outsiders and three key characters in Acts 8:26-40: the Ethiopian eunuch, Philip, and the Suffering Servant. First, Luke depicts the Ethiopian eunuch as the consummate outsider—geographically, morally, socially, ethnically, and in terms of gender—and indicates that the eunuch represents other marginalized outsiders. The eunuch shows no one can prevent outsiders like him from inclusion in the kingdom of God. Second, Luke portrays Philip as a prophet, specifically a prophet like Elijah and Elisha. Philip emulates Elijah and Elisha by reaching out to the outsider (in this instance, the Ethiopian eunuch). Third, Luke presents the Isaianic Suffering Servant as a religious and social outsider and identifies the character with Jesus and the Ethiopian eunuch. The indescribable descendants of the Suffering Servant signify a universally inclusive messianic community and fulfill the outsiders’ inclusion within the people of God as Isaiah prophesied (Isaiah 56:3-8). This thesis finally suggests ways to read the story of the Ethiopian eunuch today and concludes that it is imperative to include those outsiders among us within the community of Jesus’s followers.