Abstract
At the northern estuaries in the state of Pernambuco, Brazil, small-scale fishing activities are intensively carried out, mostly targeting shellfishes. A compelling number of fishers make this activity their main source of income or as a complementary activity to salaried work, being an important supply of protein and food security for their families. Social inequality remains critical in most rural communities, and ongoing lack of visibility and economic perception affect household income. There are considerable conflicts associated with access to beaches, as well as seas and estuaries, mostly through private land or tourism, aquaculture, agriculture, and urbanization. The highly contested and entangled socio-spatial and institutional contours of small-scale fisheries in the study region turn the story of this fisher population into an emblematic struggle for ‘defending the beach’. We describe the wicked nature of the challenges faced by small-scale fisheries in the region, and their struggles to gain land ownership and access to the beach and to coastal fishing areas, such as estuaries.
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Notes
- 1.
The transdisciplinary approach referred to herein as well as its categories of analysis including: ‘governing systems’, ‘systems to be governed’, and ‘governing interactions’, as well as their inherent diversity, complexity, dynamics, and scale follow the definition given in Chap. 3 of this book.
- 2.
In 1999, the establishment of a large-scale 300 ha shrimp farm in the Santa Cruz Canal and 500 ha in between Goiana and Megaó rivers, within the estuarine ecosystem, destroyed several hectares of mangrove swamps in order to occupy them with nurseries.
- 3.
From 2008 to 2011 the World Fisheries Trust (WFT), a Canadian-based NGO together with the Ministry of Fisheries and Aquaculture implemented the People of the Tides Project (PoT) – a specific development project to attend to shellfishers in the region. The participatory value-chain mapping exercises carried out within the project among other community development initiatives represent the first attempt by the Ministry of Fisheries to formally recognize the peculiar and unique challenges faced by this fishery.
- 4.
Política Nacional de Povos e Comunidades Tradicionais – PNPCT.
- 5.
Termo de Autorização de Uso Sustentável – TAUS.
- 6.
In 2008 the Ministry of Fisheries and Aquaculture identified within Brazil 174 territories designated as ‘fishing territories’. The objective of this program was to strengthen the fisheries sector through a territorial development paradigm. The social, economic and institutional stakeholders present in each fishing territory created a development plan to identify and prioritize essential investment to improve fisher’s livelihoods . As such the program’s pillars included (a) social participation and civic engagement; (b) decentralization of decision-making processes; (c) institutional and organizational capacity building ; (d) budgetary efficiency ; (e) territorial planning and governance (MPA 2008).
- 7.
For a more complete discussion on these challenges refer to: Santos et al. (2017) Socioecological assessment for environmental planning in coastal fishery areas: A case study in Brazilian mangroves https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0964569117300285
- 8.
President Dilma Rouseff and her newly elected Cabinet Ministers negatively evaluated the national program. The general opinion was that the program did not achieve the foreseen socioeconomic goals since its release in 2008. However, a number of academic papers on this topic suggest that the frailty of the territorial program was in large part due to the inability of the local and state institutions to think and act systematically from a territorial perspective, and thus were incapable of integrating the various dimensions of the problem. The program was designed territorial, but it did not fit into the existing institutional structures. At the local level the Council lacked the skill set to coordinate an interinstitutional body. Its inability to define a clear fishery development plan diluted the responsibilities of the council representatives in terms of the implementation of the designed strategies. Furthermore, the council members did not have the skills and institutional capacity to resolve conflicts and negotiate win-win situations.
- 9.
Caiçaras are small fishing warehouse where fishers keep the fishing tackles and boats from theft and against the weather.
- 10.
The ‘marine land’ is an area of 33 m in width, calculated from the medium high tide measured in 1831.
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Wojciechowski, M.J., Mesquita P. Ferreira, B., Vila-Nova, D.A., de Mattos, S.M.G. (2019). Defending the Beach: Transdisciplinary Approaches in Small-Scale Fisheries in Pernambuco, Brazil. In: Chuenpagdee, R., Jentoft, S. (eds) Transdisciplinarity for Small-Scale Fisheries Governance. MARE Publication Series, vol 21. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94938-3_15
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