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Reciprocal relations underscore the mutual caretaking obligations held between nature and society, as intertwining entities that are co-constituted with one another. In this paper, we draw from scholarship on human-nature relations, which emphasizes the intrinsic value and agency of non-human beings and the landscape. Building on this literature, we investigate the practice of reciprocal relations for exemplar communities in Hawaiʻi, British Columbia (Canada), the Appalachian mountain region (U.S.), and Madagascar that are all actively cultivating stewardship of natural resources in the face of economic, political, and ecological pressures. Our cases illustrate the diverse ways individuals and communities enact reciprocal relations and examine how these acts may increase community access to land and water. We show how communities mobilize reciprocal relations through both formal governance actions (e.g. management planning and legislation) and informal avenues (e.g. daily human-environment interactions). Our findings expand upon Ribot and Peluso’s theory of access by considering the multi-directional flows of benefits and responsibilities between people and places exemplified by reciprocal relations. By reframing environmental governance around mutual responsibilities, we hope to increase recognition of existing reciprocal place-based relationships, and facilitate greater community access to land, water, and resources.

Collaborative care refers to the collectively formed reciprocal relationships that emerge between the human and more-than-human world. Such care relations are more robust when individuals from different socioeconomic, gender, and political stratifications participate in decision making. This condition applies to gender equity in ocean conservation and fisheries governance practices. Despite their deep involvement in marine fisheries and their labor in sustainable fisheries management and marine conservation, women are often underrepresented in and overlooked by environmental management institutions. Highlighting the importance of gender to effective marine management underscores the need to reconfigure leadership in marine resource governance, and to reconsider how that leadership is understood. To investigate how gender affects community-based conservation, this paper explores marine management practices in Madagascar. Incorporating conversational method and auto-ethnography, we center the expertise and experience of Malagasy women leaders, who have been deeply involved with the foundation and management of a gender-inclusive community marine resource management network. This is especially relevant to Madagascar, where locally managed marine areas (LMMAs) have expanded dramatically in the last decade. Many of these LMMAs have explicitly focused on reconfiguring power relations between international conservation efforts and local resource user needs and values. Overall, the LMMA approach has improved local involvement in resource management decisions, yet areas of weakness remain. We argue that a more inclusive, and thus more effective, approach to governing marine commons requires a focus on the act of commoning: the process through which reciprocity, accountability, and collaborative care are developed within a community. To achieve whole-community governance, we advocate for allocating more resources toward such commoning practices and toward those who are most marginalized in current marine management. Madagascar’s evolving network of fisherwomen leaders provides key insights into how interventions for commoning in marine conservation can advance collaborative care of interdependent human-environment systems.

This study explores how the 2009 political crisis in Madagascar influenced local access to, and claims over, marine resources within marine protected areas. It focuses specifically on how different conservation actors constructed and maintained authority over each protected area. Surveys conducted in 2010 show how community-managed protected areas had a lower incidence of resource use rule infractions during the crisis than state-managed areas. Drawing from in-depth qualitative research conducted from 2009 to 2015, I argue that this occurred due to the discursive framing of ‘community authority’ over protected areas as well as the social relationships with, and material benefits communities received from, international conservation organisations working in the communitymanaged areas. In contrast, I argue that state-managed marine protected area rules were transgressed more due to the symbolic and physical ousting of state authority underpinning a fear-based relationship between the state managers and community members. Ultimately, this work points to the importance of understanding how different conservation actors construct and maintain authority over marine resources.

Sea cucumbers play a critical role in maintaining healthy marine ecosystems. Sea cucumbers are also a key source of income for millions of small-scale fishers worldwide. The lucrative nature of this industry has led to severe reductions in sea cucumber populations in numerous regions globally. A large proportion of sea cucumber fisheries are located in developing countries, which present unique challenges to management, including addressing highly decentralized methods of extraction and processing, limited economic and technological resources for governance and, in many cases, a high dependency on sea cucumbers as a primary source of income for small-scale coastal fishers. In this review, we review the benefits and challenges of seven categories of sea cucumber management strategies used globally in developing countries, including gear restrictions, size and weight limits, effort and catch controls, temporal closures, area closures, value chain licensing and territorial use rights in fisheries. We conclude that sea cucumber management in developing countries could benefit from focusing regulatory solutions on narrowed parts of the value chain, coupling production-based management strategies with processing and export regulations and providing avenues for local fishers to inform policy at the local, regional and national levels.

Conservation planning is the process of locating, implementing, and maintaining areas that are managed to promote the persistence of biodiversity, ecosystem function, and human use. In this review, we analyze the ways in which social processes have been integrated into Marxan, a spatially explicit conservation planning tool used as one step in a broader process to select the location and size of protected areas. Drawing on 89 peer-reviewed articles published between 2005 and 2020, we analyzed the ways in which human activity, values, and processes are spatialized in the environment, something we call socialscape ecology. A socialscape ecology approach to conservation planning considers not only the spatial configuration of human activity in a land or seascape but also the underlying drivers of these activities, how resource use rights and access operate in an area, and how resource users contribute to data collection and decision making. Our results show that there has been a small but statistically significant increase in the total number of cost variables into Marxan analysis over time, with uneven performance across seven of the nine categories assessed. One notable area of improvement has been the increase over time in number of studies integrating socio-environmental change (e.g., climate change) in their analysis. Including accurate, context-specific, and detailed accounts of social features and processes within land and seascapes is essential for developing conservation plans that are cost-effective, ecologically sound, socially desirable, and just.

From communities rooted in place to transnational coalitions, this special feature applies concepts of collaborative care rooted in Indigenous knowledge systems to the field of environmental governance. We highlight restorative, liberatory practices rooted in caretaking ethics and reciprocal human-nature relations. Our approach also centers decision making by those most connected to a given resource and the sustenance it provides. Despite global extraction, dispossession, and other colonial legacies, these efforts build toward collective action and community self-determination, both through formal policy change and informal practices. Three facets of collaborative care in environmental governance are threaded through the special feature: (1) care in place, (2) care in power, and (3) care in commoning. These themes connect both Indigenous-led and allied scholarship from the United States to the Netherlands, Japan to Madagascar, and Aotearoa to Canada. Though diverse in their interests and challenges, the authors and communities featured in this research build toward collective action and community self-determination in caring for the places that are the source of collective abundance.

This research note is part of the thematic section, Practical Realities of Giving Back, in the special issue titled “Giving Back in Field Research,” published as Volume 10, Issue 2 in the Journal of Research Practice.

Small-scale fisheries play an essential role in supporting food security and economic resilience in Madagascar’s coastal communities. These fisheries are diverse, ranging from offshore net and line fishing, often dominated by men, to nearshore gleaning and hand-held spearfishing, frequently practiced by women. Despite their importance, they remain underrepresented in official statistics, and women’s contributions are often underreported. Few studies have examined how gender, gear type, and regional context interact to shape catch composition and productivity across ecological and social settings. To address this gap, we analyzed catch-per-unit-effort data from 9,068 fishing trips conducted in 2023–2024 across 17 villages in two coastal regions of Madagascar: Diana in the north and Atsimo-Andrefana in the southwest. We examined how gear use, catch composition, and productivity varied by gender and region, complemented by social surveys documenting fishers’ habitats, access modes (e.g., walking, sailboat), and key organisms harvested. Framed within a coupled human-natural systems perspective, our approach recognizes reciprocal links between ecological conditions, fishing practices, and socio-economic contexts. Gamma GLMs showed that catch-per-unit-effort was consistently higher in Diana, consistent with healthier reefs and greater access to efficient gears. Spearguns, predominantly used by men, yielded the highest predicted catch-per-unit-effort (3.00 kg fisher -1 h -1 in Diana; 1.23 in Atsimo-Andrefana). Hand-held spears also performed well, particularly in Diana, where women had slightly higher catch-per-unit-effort than men (2.13 vs. 1.85 kg fisher -1 h -1 ), reflecting shorter, targeted trips for octopus and fish. In contrast, fishers in Atsimo-Andrefana operated in habitats characterized as more degraded and used less advanced gear, resulting in lower overall catch-per-unit-effort and greater diversification, especially among women harvesting invertebrates. All catch-per-unit-effort values were calculated using total trip duration, and some catch weights were imputed from average species weights. Despite uneven sampling effort, sensitivity analyses confirmed these factors did not alter conclusions. This analysis provides a quantitative baseline for future work tracking how coupled social and ecological dynamics in these fisheries evolve over time. Our results highlight how ecological conditions, gear access, and gendered practices shape fishing strategies, emphasizing the need for management approaches addressing both environmental change and the social realities of communities dependent on marine resources.

The loud chorus songs of the group-living lemur Indri indri are a striking feature of rainforest areas of eastern Madagascar. Despite some research on the conspicuous vocal display of the indri, two hypotheses have not been addressed: do groups differ in the acoustic properties of their songs, and is there evidence of coordinated singing between individuals within groups. We recorded and analyzed the songs of three indri groups to examine these two questions. To answer the first question, we made quantitative spectral measures on songs of the three groups and performed multivariate analyses of the acoustic features of the notes constituting the songs. Our results showed songs of the three groups differed significantly, although there was overlap between groups. To answer the second question, we classified note types and quantified their occurrence as overlapping and abutting pairs. We found non-random associations between sequential note types in all three indri groups. These associations were consistent among groups, suggesting that individuals follow consistent answering rules when contributing to choruses. Whether indris use acoustic group identifiers in management of behavioral strategies and how within-group coordinated note production might function remain unknown. We compare our results to a number of taxonomically diverse species that live in groups and broadcast chorus and duet vocal signals.

Abstract As industrial vessels continue to expand in both extractive capacity and spatial range, concerns have grown over foreign industrial fishing occurring within the marine territories of developing countries, both legally and illegally. Madagascar’s status as a “least developed country”, coupled with its high marine biodiversity, makes its waters particularly susceptible to fishing by distant water fishing nations (DWFNs). However, given constraints in management and research, it is unclear how foreign industrial fishing, both legal via foreign agreements and illegal, may impact local marine resources that many coastal communities depend on for food security, cultural meaning and livelihoods. We used satellite-derived fishing effort data from 2012-2020, via Global Fishing Watch, to analyze industrial fishing effort occurring within Madagascar’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). We documented 907,643 hours of industrial fishing within the Madagascar EEZ across 277 vessels from 17 different countries. We found that Taiwanease vessels (39.8%) using drifting longlines and Malagasy (17.2% shrimp trawlers were the most prevalent. Fishing effort was highly seasonal (68% of effort between October and February) and increased with higher global fish prices and the Indian Ocean Dipole, which is a measure of regional water temperature cycles. We also found a number of instances (17.6% of the fishing effort for 170,726 total hours) of foreign fishing vessels operating close to shore and within a number of marine protected areas. These results highlight the need for increased transparency surrounding foreign fishing agreements and unauthorized fishing within the waters of developing countries. Increases in industrial fishing effort and encroachment into near-shore areas has the potential to severely threaten current sustainable fisheries management initiatives by conservation organizations and coastal communities. Highlights 1. Distant water fishing nations dominated fishing efforts within Madagascar’s EEZ. 2. Longlining by foreign nations was the dominant fishing mode and increased from October-February. 3. Malagasy vessels focused on trawling for shrimp. 4. Fishing effort increased during positive Indian Ocean Dipoles and with higher fish prices. 5. Distant water fishing nations frequently fished close to shore and sometimes within MPAs. Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. Footnotes * Introduction and discussion to provide more context around industrial fishing; Small updates to figures * https://github.com/eastonwhite/GFW-Madagascar