ABSTRACT
Fisheries governance is a notoriously difficult undertaking (Beddington et al. 2007). Success and failure in this arena are influenced by a wide variety of both social and ecological factors. In the social domain, issues range from the fuzzy boundaries around resource use zones that often seem to result in classic open access regime failures (Pauly et al. 1998), and the reality that fishers tend to behave opportunistically to resource availability and market forces, which makes long-term predictions of fisher behaviour challenging (Defeo and Castilla 1998, Berkes et al. 2006, Defeo and Castilla 2012). In the ecological domain, fisheries are highly complex in themselves, and characteristically feature high levels of uncertainty regarding the size and dynamics of fish and/or invertebrate populations (de la Torre-Castro and Lindström 2010). In the case of benthic marine invertebrates in particular, which are the subject of this chapter, uncertainty in the ecological domain stems from recruitment (Lima et al. 2000), which is highly variable at different spatial and temporal scales, and which depends on connectivity among metapopulations (Fogarty and Botsford 2007, Cowen and Sponaugle 2009). Coastal small-scale fisheries thus share many features with other cases of NTFPs, under the broad definition of NTFPs discussed in Chapter 2.
