In many parts of the world, natural resources are primarily managed by governance arrangements at the local level. Those arrangements range from collective, such as cooperatives and associations, to individualistic, such as patrons and owner‐operators. A key question is how such arrangements influence resource use and associated social and ecological outcomes. We hypothesize that sustainable resource use is not associated with...

Climate change is expected to have significant impacts on the biology, abundance and distribution of transboundary fish stocks, not only among neighbouring countries within the jurisdictions of regional fisheries management organisations (RFMOs) but also between adjacent RFMOs. Using South Pacific albacore tuna ( Thunnus alalunga ) as a case study, we highlight how RFMOs need to understand the impacts of climate change on tran...

Small Pelagic Fish (SPF) exhibit large fluctuations in abundance and distribution in response to environmental variability. To maintain the resilience of fishing communities and develop effective and equitable climate adaptation strategies, improved understanding of how the fishing industry responds to spatio-temporal shifts within and across SPF populations is of critical importance. In this paper, we examine the responses of...

The management and conservation of tuna and other transboundary marine species have to date been limited by an incomplete understanding of the oceanographic, ecological and socioeconomic factors mediating fishery overlap and interactions, and how these factors vary across expansive, open ocean habitats. Despite advances in fisheries monitoring and biologging technology, few attempts have been made to conduct integrated ecologi...

Small-scale fisheries are critically important for livelihoods around the world, particularly in tropical regions. However, climate variability and anthropogenic climate change may seriously impact small-scale fisheries by altering the abundance and distribution of target species. Social relationships between fishery users, such as fish traders, can determine how each individual responds and is affected by changes in fisheries...

Marine fisheries around the globe are increasingly exposed to external drivers of social and ecological change. Though diversification and flexibility have historically helped marine resource users negotiate risk and adversity, much of modern fisheries management treats fishermen as specialists using specific gear types to target specific species. Here, we describe the evolution of harvest portfolios amongst Pacific Northwest...

Inaccurate or incomplete diagnosis of the root causes of overfishing can lead to misguided and ineffective fisheries policies and programmes. The “Malthusian overfishing narrative” suggests that overfishing is driven by too many fishers chasing too few fish and that fishing effort grows proportionately to human population growth, requiring policy interventions that reduce fisher access, the number of fishers, or the human popu...