Sustainability scientists have engaged in extensive discussions on ethical ways of doing research and argued on the importance of co-production approaches to counter knowledge extractivism. The specific issue of research fatigue, often associated with knowledge extractivism, and the possible methods to counter it, have however received less attention. This paper seeks to contribute to discussions on ethical ways of doing research by focusing on our experience of using theatre, specifically, Forum Theatre, to investigate divergent perceptions of environmental change and related tensions among selected coastal communities in Kenya and Mozambique. We argue that Forum Theatre constitutes an ethical method for sustainability scientists for four reasons: (i) it allows to co-produce knowledge with participants; (ii) it facilitates horizontal exchange; (iii) it creates joyful moments; and (iv) it enables the transmission of skills that remain with participants beyond project durations. The paper engages with these four themes, first theoretically and then proposing a reflection based on our project experience. In the last section, we warn against some of the limitations of the approach.

Small-scale fisheries are likely to experience a higher frequency and magnitude of environmental and socioeconomic change because of increasing climate shocks and pressures that result from them, as well as because of the influence of global market dynamics. Fisheries’ responses to the impacts of global change are often influenced by relations between fishers and traders. Such relations constitute a link between markets, fishers, and the marine ecosystems. However, the ways that fisher-trader relations respond to global change, influencing the adaptive capacities of small-scale fisheries are poorly understood. Addressing this gap in this paper, we explore how fisher-trader relations, embedded within other social, ecological, and social-ecological relations, mediate change, such as disasters, new policies, or market demand. We do this by mapping the interactions that shape the mediating role of the fisher-trader relations in five case studies of small-scale fisheries. Synthesizing among the case studies we develop a typology of combinations of relations, their roles, and characteristics that influence the capacity of small-scale fisheries to respond to abrupt, slow, and cyclical change, resulting in absorbing or reinforcing its effects. Particularly we show how fisher-trader relations can generate the capacity to maintain livelihoods and form new relations when exposed to disruptive change and the capacity to increase supply in response to new market opportunities. The findings highlight the importance of studying responses to change in small-scale fisheries through the lens of relations and combinations of relations rather than individual behaviors. Future research on this topic could explore how the identified patterns of relations, including fisher-trader relations, may mediate change in other socio-cultural and social-ecological contexts, and when exposed to different types of disturbances.

As sustainability scientists increasingly put forward the relevance of process-relational approaches to make sense of social-ecological phenomena, an inquiry on which methods would fit a process-relational approach is necessary. This paper discusses how a process-relational approach can be applied to traditional qualitative research methods, namely interviews and coding and the tensions associated with it. Process-relational perspectives share commonalities with interpretative approaches but also present specific characteristics, such as the importance of material aspects and the understanding of the phenomenon as a moment in which different elements become defined respective to each other. The paper uses data and researchers' experiences from an action research project seeking to support collective action among coastal communities affected by environmental changes in Kenya and Mozambique. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

Monitoring the governance and management effectiveness of area-based conservation has long been recognized as an important foundation for achieving national and global biodiversity goals and enabling adaptive management. However, there are still many barriers that prevent conservation actors, including those affected by governance and management systems from implementing conservation activities and programs and from gathering and using data on governance and management to inform decision-making across spatial scales and through time. We explored current and past efforts to assess governance and management effectiveness and barriers actors face in using the resulting data and insights to inform conservation decision-making. To help overcome these barriers, we developed Elinor, a free and open-source monitoring tool that builds on the work of Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom to facilitate the gathering, storing, sharing, analyzing, and use of data on environmental governance and management across spatial scales and for areas under different governance and management types. We consider the process of codesigning and piloting Elinor with conservation scientists and practitioners and the main components of the assessment and online data system. We also consider how Elinor complements existing approaches by addressing governance and management in a single assessment at a high level for different types of area-based conservation, providing flexible options for data collection, and integrating a data system with an assessment that can support data use and sharing across different spatial scales, including global monitoring of the Global Biodiversity Framework. Although challenges will continue, the process of developing Elinor and the tool itself offer tangible solutions to barriers that prevent the systematic collection and use of governance and management data. With broader uptake, Elinor can play a valuable role in enabling more effective, inclusive, and durable area-based conservation.

Our study of periodic octopus closures helps to fill an empirical gap in community-based marine protected area (MPA) research on socially-diverse multidimensional wellbeing impacts. Human wellbeing provides a more meaningful and holistic measure of social impacts than previous economic measures while recognising equity- evidence that ultimately ensures support and enables long-term success in conservation. We trace the flow of benefits, costs and burdens from closures at three sites in Zanzibar and explore how different types of fishers and traders perceive impacts. This is done at a personal, livelihood group and village or community level, as well as in terms of ecosystem effects. Storytelling, photo-elicitation tasks and focused discussions prioritized participants’ emic descriptions and understandings of closures. We iteratively, qualitatively coded data using a three-dimensional (material, relational and subjective) social wellbeing approach. Despite different conditions and histories at the three sites, participants identified similar wellbeing attributes as affected by the closure. Themes included social conflict, non-compliance, income, education, food/nutrition, and communal benefits reflecting recent literature on MPAs and human wellbeing. Perceptions of inequity cross cut all three dimensions and gender was a strong dimension that emphasized procedural and distributional inequity between different types of livelihood groups e.g. small-scale traderwomen and male skindivers. Material wellbeing losses due to poor market environments highlighted how better alignment is needed between periodic closure activities and resulting value chain dynamics. Opening events intensely impacted wellbeing across all dimensions, suggesting that these moments are critical for creating positive perceptions or losing support for closures.

Marine protected areas like periodic closures are increasingly used to improve both fisheries management and biodiversity conservation, and often secondarily, human well-being. Yet rule breaking, whether formal regulations, or community-agreed norms, continues to negate expected management and conservation outcomes, remaining a major challenge. Although compliance scholarship today is expanding beyond non-economic explanations of (non)-compliance behaviour, approaches and theory used fail to show the diversity of perceptions and dispositions that can underpin motivations. A deepening engagement with behavioural sciences like sociology, psychology or behavioural economics is increasingly recognized as key in tackling compliance issues in marine protected areas. In this paper, we contribute to such a strand of compliance scholarship by presenting the responses and positions to (non-) compliance, rules/regulations and authorities of different people, for example, fishers, traders and others involved in an area-based fishery management intervention in Zanzibar, Tanzania. We take a qualitative approach aligning with an interpretive research ethic to carry out story circles, photo-elicitation tasks and focus groups at three sites enacting periodic octopus closures. Theory drawn from sociology, anthropology and cognitive sciences was used to interpret how participants justified were motivated by or dispositioned towards rules, rule makers and rule breakers. Generally, the area-management intervention was supported by participants, signalling the potential for future compliance most commonly based on the recognition of a degraded marine ecosystem in need of protection. However, the diverse and dynamic responses by different livelihood groups (i.e. traders and fishers) indicated on which basis and through which logics compliance behaviour was condoned or legitimated. This type of insight can help managers gauge or anticipate the potential for non-compliance in participatory approaches that can impact the health of marine ecosystems. Recommendations include providing discussion spaces for conservation participants' (not just fishermen or fishery organizations) own meanings to be understood and not assumed. Meanings which create and shape relations, actions and concepts in marine protected area processes and thus directly impact the uptake and sustainability of conservation interventions. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

Small islands are highly dependent on their natural endowments. Because of this dependency, they are more vulnerable to climate change. This paper builds on the assumption that a better understanding of the meaning of climate change in specific local contexts (from localized perspectives) opens up possibilities for climate change adaptations. Based on literature reviews, semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions and forum theatre performances, the paper provides various perceptions of climate change effects from KaNyaka Island in Mozambique. It endeavors to further build the case for the integration of everyday-life experiences and observations of environmental processes in developing collective responses to climate change. The study does so by looking at the way island inhabitants, who are particularly vulnerable to climate change, perceive this phenomenon. The paper argues that the KaNyaka residents are part of local ecologies in which physical and spiritual worlds are entangled in everyday life. It also avers that for a better understanding and response to the adverse effects of climate change on the island, scientists at large must approach local communities as co-producers of knowledge. This relational approach allows the incorporation of worldviews that have been key in sustaining enfolding relationships between people and local ecology. It concludes that this approach opens the possibility of adaptation to climate change as an embedded socio-environmental phenomenon.

Meeting the objectives of sustainable fisheries management requires attention to the complex interactions between humans, institutions and ecosystems that give rise to fishery outcomes. Traditional approaches to studying fisheries often do not fully capture, nor focus on these complex interactions between people and ecosystems. Despite advances in the scope and scale of interactions encompassed by more holistic methods, for example ecosystem-based fisheries management approaches, no single method can adequately capture the complexity of human–nature interactions. Approaches that combine quantitative and qualitative analytical approaches are necessary to generate a deeper understanding of these interactions and illuminate pathways to address fisheries sustainability challenges. However, combining methods is inherently challenging and requires understanding multiple methods from different, often disciplinarily distinct origins, demanding reflexivity of the researchers involved. Social–ecological systems’ research has a history of utilising combinations of methods across the social and ecological realms to account for spatial and temporal dynamics, uncertainty and feedbacks that are key components of fisheries. We describe several categories of analytical methods (statistical modelling, network analysis, dynamic modelling, qualitative analysis and controlled behavioural experiments) and highlight their applications in fisheries research, strengths and limitations, data needs and overall objectives. We then discuss important considerations of a methods portfolio development process, including reflexivity, epistemological and ontological concerns and illustrate these considerations via three case studies. We show that, by expanding their methods portfolios, researchers will be better equipped to study the complex interactions shaping fisheries and contribute to solutions for sustainable fisheries management.

Small-scale fishing communities are increasingly connected to international seafood trade via exports in a growing global market. Understanding how this connectedness impacts local fishery systems, both socially and ecologically, has become a necessary challenge for fishery governance. Market prices are a potential mechanism by which global market demands are transferred to small-scale fishery actors. In most small-scale fisheries (SSF) this happens through various traders (intermediaries, middlemen/women, or patrons). By financing fishing operations, buying and selling products and transferring market information, traders can actively pass international market signals, such as price, to fishers. How these signals influence fishers' decisions and the consequent fishing efforts, is still poorly understood yet significant for future social-ecological sustainability. This paper uses an economic framed field experiment, in combination with interviews, to shed light on this. It does so in the context of the Philippine patron-client suki arrangement. Over 250 fishers in Concepcion, Iloilo were asked in an economic experiment, to make decisions about fuel loans in light of changing market prices. Interviews with participants and their patrons gathered additional information on relevant contextual variables potentially influencing borrowing. They included fisher characteristics and socio-economic conditions. Contrary to our hypotheses, fishers showed no response in their borrowing behavior to experimental price changes. Instead, gender and the previous experiment round were predictive of their choice of loans in the experiment. We explore possible reasons for this and discuss potential implications for social-ecological sustainability and fishery governance.

The majority of the world's fishers, fishworkers and their dependents live in coastal tropical areas that are, and will be, highly exposed to human-induced climate change. Projections indicate such change could result in coastal populations being more frequently and acutely impacted by natural disasters. Increasing aid interventions is a likely knock-on effect of such scenarios. How these external natural and social disturbances interact and affect local fisheries and small-scale producers is in part determined by the internal dynamics of the social-ecological system (SES). Economic vulnerability often characterizes communities in these settings and influences the means with which they navigate changes. The patron-client system is prolific in many rural economies and small-scale fisheries. It forms a central element in the organization of market interactions and often provides much needed finance for low-income households in place of formal options. How such injection of capital promotes individuals' ability to buffer income fluctuations at the expense of long-term sustainability of the broader fishery system is still an area in need of examination. This paper contributes to shed light on this issue by using a case study approach to trace the historical development of the fishery system in the Iloilo Province (Philippines) in relation to a major natural disaster-super-typhoon Haiyan, known locally as Yolanda-and the subsequent aid intervention that followed. The aim is to assess how the patron-client system filtered these two related disturbances and to highlight the resulting tensions between short-term individual resilience and longer-term SES sustainability.