Women’s experiences in influencing and shaping small‐scale fisheries governance

Abstract

This paper synthesizes current empirical evidence on how women experience, shape and influence small‐scale fisheries (SSF) governance. Our synthesis addresses an important gap in the literature, and helps highlight the opportunities to improve women's participation in governance and advance gender equality. We identified, characterized and synthesized 54 empirical cases at the intersection of gender and SSF governance, which comprise the relevant body of literature. Our review confirms the need to embed gender in the empirical examination of SSF governance towards expanding the current evidence base on this topic. We found that the institutional contexts within which women participate reflect a broad spectrum of arrangements, including the interactions with rules and regulations; participatory arrangements such as co‐management; and informal norms, customary practices and relational spaces. We also synthesized a typology of governance tasks performed by women in SSF. The typology includes leadership roles and active participation in decision‐making; relational networking and collective action; exercising agency and legitimacy; resource monitoring; knowledge sharing; meeting attendance (with no/less participation in decision‐making); and activism and mass mobilization. Furthermore, we drew broader insights based on the patterns that emerged across the literature and highlighted implications for improving women's meaningful participation in SSF governance. For example, exploring the breadth of governance arrangements to include all governance spaces where women are active, adjusting governance arrangements to respond to current and emerging barriers, and recognizing how women's efforts link with societal values may help legitimize their representation in SSF governance. Findings of this review should be of interest to the scholarly community, practitioners and policymakers alike and inform future research agendas, policy dialogues and practice intervention.

“Ocean Optimism” and Resilience: Learning From Women’s Responses to Disruptions Caused by COVID-19 to Small-Scale Fisheries in the Gulf of Guinea

“…Specifically, we focus on how women in the SSF sector have responded to the disruptions caused by COVID-19 and assess the resilience-potential of these responses based on how these responses interact with their pre-existing SSF vulnerabilities. This line of inquiry has critical importance, given the high degree of vulnerability that existing research within SSF has recognised among women within this sector (see, for instance, Thorpe et al, 2014;Harper et al, 2017;Galappaththi et al, 2022;Oloko et al, 2022). This also aligns with gendered resilience studies, which argue that a gendered view of resilience is critical to advancing an inclusive and sustainable understanding of resilience approaches (see, for example, Smyth and Sweetman, 2015).…”

“…These dynamics produce gendered vulnerabilities that further disadvantage them (see: Isaacs et al, 2022). Gendered definitions of fishing (Harper et al, 2017;Galappaththi et al, 2022), earnings gaps (Thorpe et al, 2014;Du Preez, 2018) and social expectations (Oloko et al, 2022) conspire to render women invisible in SSF, as their participation in SSF continues to be concentrated in the informal economy where they are excluded from institutional consideration or social protections (Okafor-Yarwood and van den Berg, 2021). Specifically, women's fisheries work is often perceived merely as an extension of their gendered everyday lives (Harper et al, 2017), limiting their livelihood security and making them particularly vulnerable to disruptions that threaten their already precarious livelihoods.…”

Assessment of women's contribution in small‐scale fisheries in Indian Sundarbans: Issues, strategies, and way forward for sustainability

“…Capacity of women involved in SSF must be developed to fully enhance their roles in fishery resource management and to have a more active role in decision making at all levels. Inclusion of representative women's voices in fisheries governance can be crucial (Galappaththi et al, 2022).…”

“…Inclusion of representative women's voices in fisheries governance can be crucial (Galappaththi et al, 2022).…”

Toward marine sustainability: Unveiling the effect of the fishery industry on blue carbon sequestration

“…They found that the absorbable areas related to fisheries management, operations, and research needed more political, social, and relationship input. Similarly, Drakopulos (2022) and Galappaththi et al (2022) investigated women's experiences influencing and shaping small‐scale fisheries governance. They did this by referring to the institutional contexts within which women participate, reflecting a broad spectrum of arrangements, including interactions with rules and regulations; participatory arrangements like co‐management; and informal norms, customary practices, and relational spaces.…”