DDIG: Knowledge, Networks, and Capital: Adapting to Change in a Small-Scale Mexican Fishery

University Of Florida, Gainesville FL

Investigators

Abstract

Graduate student Ava J. Lasseter, supervised by Dr. Anthony Oliver-Smith, will undertake research on how small-scale fishermen employ social resources to adapt to changes in natural resource. The research goals are two-fold: to produce a systematic test of the concept of resilience, a theory that describes change in socio-ecological systems; and to contribute to the study of common property resources by examining how human actors respond when faced with finite resources. Previous scholarship has addressed the regulation of resource use at the community level, but this study offers a novel approach by operationalizing the social factors that influence individual as well as group decision-making. The study will be able to examine how three social resources influence the strategies of a group of small-scale producers faced with declining resources. The adaptability of the fishermen will then be examined in terms of the resilience of the socio-ecological system and whether the tenets of resilience theory are supported or refuted. The research design includes the development of three measures for social resources: 1) knowledge, 2) social networks, and 3) access to capital. Differential access to social resources is hypothesized to correlate with the fishermen's responses to environmental change. Accordingly, the three measures will be tested for their ability to predict how adaptive strategies are employed. The research will be carried out among members of a fishing cooperative in the state of Yucatan, Mexico. In fisheries management, policy is principally based on available data for the species to be manageed. Data on how policy would impact resource users is often unavailable to policy makers. By operationalizing and testing measures of social resources and examining how these factors influence decision making, the results of this study will be useful in the development of fisheries policy in the face of declining resources. Ultimately, the research will contribute to new and more powerful social science theory of human adaptation to dynamic systems.