Commentary 1 to the Manifesto for the Marine Social Sciences: fisheries

Abstract

Fisheries have long dominated the agenda of marine social sciences. For most of the twentieth century, studies tended to focus on ethnographies of fishing communities and case studies of local management, and often located in the Global South. Research activities were fragmented, remained academic, and had little impact on policy (Symes et al. 2019). The last 25 years witnessed changes, with increasing focus on fisheries management studies in the Global North, and a growing, yet sometimes hesitant, recognition from policy-makers that social sciences have an important role to play in showing interactions between marine policies on the one hand and fishers' behaviour, compliance, communities and heritage on the other (Symes and Hoefnagel 2010; Urquhart et al. 2011). At the same time, significant changes are taking place in terms of marine use, with coastal and offshore waters no longer being the exclusive domain of fishers. Nature conservation and development, land reclamation, tourism, aquaculture, shipping, mineral extraction and, more recently, renewable energy production particularly through offshore wind farms are putting increasing stress on the oceans, on traditional users and on governance. So does climate change. Considering the current focus on Blue Growth or the Blue Economy (Arbo et al. 2018; Mulazzani and Malorgio * Nathalie A.

Development and Expansion in the Marine Social Sciences: Insights from the Global Community

“…Research in the marine social sciences encompasses a wide range of research topics and themes, as well as a variety of approaches (see Bennett et al, 2017). Fisheries have long dominated the agenda of marine social sciences (Fleming et al, 2021;Steins et al, 2020;Bavinck et al, 2018). However, in recent years, other topics have garnered increasing attention (McKinley et al, 2019(McKinley et al, , 2020.…”

Ocean-human relations in the Anthropocene: mapping trends in sustainability-related marine social sciences articles

“…The roots of marine social science can be traced back to fishery community studies (Arbo et al, 2018;Bavinck and Verrips, 2020; Frontiers in Marine Science frontiersin.org Steins et al, 2020). It therefore comes as no surprise that fisheries (management), aquaculture, and food security appears as an important research stream in our analysis, covering 162 articles.…”

Co-creating Knowledge with Fishers: Challenges and Lessons for Integrating Fishers' Knowledge Contributions into Marine Science in Well-Developed Scientific Advisory Systems

“…Whilst there are only a few documented cases where scientists and scientific consultants employed by the fishing industry or other stakeholders have 'bent' scientific evidence in favor of the industry or conservation purposes, or have contested the scientific process (Starr et al, 1998;Loring, 2017;Moore et al, 2018;Kraan et al, 2020;O'Brien, 2022), such cases have contributed to the perception that stakeholderemployed scientists should be regarded with suspicion. However, there are also cases where scientists from marine institutes or academia, using their institutional credentials in the name of the scientific advice committee they are a member of, have acted as advocacy scientists in support of stakeholder views (Rice, 2011;Steins et al, 2020b;Mossler, 2021;Harris, 2022;Hutchings, 2022) or have selectively used information in science communications as a commodity seeking to polarize views to highlight debate and garner readership, instead of promoting understanding (for example, Pauly et al, 2013;Harris, 2022). Finally, there are also (mostly un-documented) examples from Europe and Canada where government, not industry or conservation stakeholders, has put pressure on scientists to advocate specific positions (e.g., Hutchings, 2022).…”