Towards a functional typology of small-scale fisheries co-management informed by stakeholder perceptions: A coral reef case study

Co-management has gained significant traction in small-scale fisheries as part of the solution for resolving economic inefficiency, unsustainable harvesting and unequal distribution of benefits derived from fisheries, generating some promising results. Most studies, however, present co-management as the sharing of power between resource users and centralised government, and do not explicitly consider the role of a more diverse set of stakeholders, or what roles different stakeholder types are best positioned to perform. This paper contributes to our understanding of stakeholder diversity by determining, through surveys with 133 fishery stakeholders in Solomon Islands, which stakeholder types are perceived as most suited to particular co-management roles, and which stakeholder types should be collaborating to increase fishery stocks. The effect of respondent socio-demographics, on perceived roles, is tested to explore the value of the role typology. Ten dominant roles were identified across seven stakeholder types, including collaboration and raising awareness, which were perceived to be dominantly the domain of auxiliary stakeholders that are not explicitly recognised in the co-management literature, including NGOs and church leaders. Of the socio-demographic variables tested, only site explained some of the variation in stakeholder roles perceived by respondents. The primary value of the typology lies in its potential to be used as a basis for dialogue on strengths and weaknesses of allocated roles for increasing fish stocks in existing co-management systems.