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\"Fishing Lessons shares the stories of success and decline, told by those at the ends of the long lines and hand lines. Kevin Bailey knows the waters, the small scale industry, and the relationships to ocean ecology. In a series of place based chapters, he channels readers through the changing dynamics of small-scale fisheries and the issues of sustainability they face--fiscal and ecological.\"-- Provided by publisher.

As digitalization in the agricultural sector has intensified, the number of studies addressing adoption and use of digital technologies in crop production and livestock farming has also increased. However, digitalization trends in the context of small-scale farming have mainly been excluded from such studies. The focus of this paper is on investigating the sequential adoption of precision agriculture (PA) and other digital technologies, and the use of multiple technologies in a small-scale agricultural region in southern Germany. An online survey of farmers yielded a total of 2,390 observations, of which 1,820 operate in field farming, and 1,376 were livestock farmers. A heuristic approach was deployed to identify adoption patterns. Probable multiple uses of 30 digital farming technologies and decision-support applications, as well as potential trends of sequential technology adoption were analyzed for four sequential points of adoption (entry technology, currently used technologies, and planned short-term and mid-term investments). Results show that Bavarian farmers cannot be described as exceedingly digitalized but show potential adoption rates of 15–20% within the next five years for technologies such as barn robotics, section control, variable-rate applications, and maps from satellite data. Established use of entry technologies (e.g., automatic milking systems, digital field records, automatic steering systems) increased the probability of adoption of additional technologies. Among the most used technologies, the current focus is on user-friendly automation solutions that reduce farmers’ workload. Identifying current equipment and technology trends in small-scale agriculture is essential to strengthen policy efforts to promote digitalization.

Local support is important for the longevity of conservation initiatives. The literature suggests that perceptions of ecological effectiveness, social impacts, and good governance will influence levels of local support for conservation. This paper examines these relationships using data from a survey of small‐scale fishermen in 11 marine protected areas from six countries in the Mediterranean Sea. The survey queried small‐scale fishermen regarding perceptions and support for conservation. We constructed composite scores for three categories of perceptions—ecological effectiveness, social impacts, and good governance—and tested the relationship with levels of support using ordinal regression models. While all three factors were positively correlated with support for conservation, perceptions of good governance and social impacts were stronger predictors of increasing support. These findings suggest that employing good governance processes and managing social impacts may be more important than ecological effectiveness for maintaining local support for conservation.

In recent years, a number of academic analyses have emerged which draw attention to how most artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) activities - low-tech, labour-intensive, mineral extraction and processing - occur in informal 'spaces'. This body of scholarship, however, is heavily disconnected from work being carried out by policy-makers and donors who, recognising the growing economic importance of ASM in numerous rural sections of the developing world, are now working to identify ways in which to facilitate the formalisation of its activities. It has rather drawn mostly on theories of informality that have been developed around radically different, and in many cases, incomparable, experiences, as well as largely redundant ideas, to contextualise phenomena in the sector. This paper reflects critically on the implications of this widening gulf, with the aim of facilitating a better alignment of scholarly debates on ASM's informality with overarching policy/donor objectives. The divide must be bridged if the case for formalising ASM is to be strengthened, and policy is to be reformulated to reflect more accurately the many dimensions of the sector's operations.

Climatic variability and change continue to militate against efforts to increase agricultural productivity and food and nutrition security in many developing countries. Several studies propose crop diversification as a climate risk management strategy to increase production and food security. Most of the empirical studies are based on cross-sectional data that do not account for unobserved factors that may affect crop diversification. A disaggregated analysis of the influence of climatic variability and change on crop diversification by agroecological profiles is less explored. Panel studies also do not combine more than one climatic variability and change indicator as we do. We employ panel data models on farm household and 31-year rainfall and temperature data to analyze the effects of climatic variability and change on crop diversification among small-scale farmers disaggregated by agroecological zones in Kenya. We find widespread crop diversification among small farms in warmer regions as a risk management strategy. Results further show that smaller farm size, limited use of inorganic fertilizer, low household incomes, and limited access to off-farm livelihood options influence the decision to diversify crop production. However, crop diversification is not a one-size-fits-all strategy and should be adopted in situations where it gives maximum benefits, consistent with existing land use policies and known benefits of a specified crop portfolio. Crop diversification should not crowd-out specialization, particularly among resource-endowed farmers.

Small-scale fisheries (SSF) have long been overshadowed by the concerns and perceived importance of the industrial sector in fisheries science and policy. Yet in recent decades, attention to SSF is on the rise, marked by a proliferation of scientific publications, the emergence of new global policy tools devoted to the small-scale sector, and concerted efforts to tally the size and impacts of SSF on a global scale. Given the rising tide of interest buoying SSF, it’s pertinent to consider how the underlying definition shapes efforts to enumerate and scale up knowledge on the sector—indicating what dimensions of SSF count and consequently what gets counted. Existing studies assess how national fisheries policies define SSF, but to date, no studies systematically and empirically examine how the definition of SSF has been articulated in science, including whether and how definitions have changed over time. We systematically analyzed how SSF were defined in the peer-reviewed scientific literature drawing on a database of 1,724 articles published between 1960 and 2015. We coded a 25% random sample of articles (n=434) from our database and found that nearly one-quarter did not define SSF. Among those that did proffer a definition, harvest technologies such as fishing boats and gear were the most common characteristics used. Comparing definitions over time, we identified two notable trends over the 65-year time period studied: a decreasing proportion of articles that defined SSF and an increasing reliance on technological dimensions like boats relative to sociocultural characteristics. Our results resonate with findings from similar research on the definition of SSF in national fisheries policies that also heavily rely on boat length. We call attention to several salient issues that are obscured by an overreliance on harvest technologies in definitions of SSF, including dynamics along the wider fisheries value chain and social relations such as gender. We discuss our findings considering new policies and emerging tools that could steer scientists and practitioners toward more encompassing, consistent, and relational means of defining SSF that circumvent some of the limitations of longstanding patterns in science and policy that impinge upon sustainable and just fisheries governance.

Are agroforestry systems still realistic methods to balance forestation and livelihood for small-scale farmers? To answer this question, the author continuously monitored a 48-year agroforestry management system from the perspective of land management history and tree growth. The study plot is located in Tenggarong district, East Kalimantan Province, Borneo, Indonesia. The site covers a total area of 2 ha and has been managed by a farmer since 1974. Chronological data on the cultivated crops and tree growth were collected through direct observations and mensuration by local university researchers. As of 2022, an Agathis forest with a standing stock volume of 632.4 m3 had been created by agroforestry practices. On the other hand, the average income he generated was US$ 1231/year from 1974 to 2016. The gross cash income of the farmer was below or at the same level as the provincial minimum wage for 23 years or 48% of the entire management period. The results of the current study showed that the main income source changed over the years. This change was influenced by many factors, such as family member life stage, social demand supported by the increasing population, Agathis tree growth and farmer age. In response to change, the farmer planted many kinds of crops and selected the most profitable commodity in each period. Due to this trial-and-selection approach, his income source was diversified and generated a stable cash income not only throughout the year, but also throughout the 48 years management period. The results of the current case study showed that the agroforestry system is a realistic method for forestation and long-term management for small-scale farmer. On the other hand, it is not the optimal method if the purpose is to maximize cash income.

The Spanish conquest of Peru was motivated by the quest for precious metals, a search that resulted in the discovery of massive silver deposits in what is now southern Bolivia. The enormous flow of specie into the world economy is usually attributed to the Spanish imposition of a forced labor system on the Indigenous population as well as the introduction of European technology. This narrative omits the role played by thousands of independent miners, often working illegally, who at different points in history generated up to 30 percent of the silver produced in the region. In this work, Mary Van Buren examines the long-term history of these workers, the technology they used, and their relationship to successive large-scale mining. The methods of historian Bertell Ollman, particularly a dialectical approach and \"doing history backwards,\" are used to examine small-scale mineral production in Porco, Bolivia. The research is based on nine seasons of archaeological fieldwork and historical research, with a particular focus on labor and technology. Van Buren argues that artisanal mineral production must be understood in relation to large-scale mining rather than as a traditional practice and that the Bolivian case is a culturally specific instantiation of a broader economic phenomenon that began under colonial regimes.

Understanding compliance with conservation rules is key for biodiversity conservation. Here, we assess compliance and its underlying motivations in a small‐scale fishery in Chile. We adapt a framework originally developed for forestry to unpack compliance motivations at within‐individual and between‐individuals levels while accounting for contextual factors. We find that 92–100% fishers comply with temporal or gear rules, while only 3% comply with the quota limit. Legitimacy‐based motivations are more important in explaining why individual fishers comply with temporal/gear rules than they are for compliance with the quota. At the between‐individuals level, we find that normative motivations are significantly related to the degree of non‐compliance with the quota. Contextual factors such as quota levels are key in explaining broader non‐compliance patterns. Our results suggest that considering compliance at appropriate analytical levels is necessary to unpack motivations, guide local and national natural resource management policies, and move toward a better theory of compliance.

Fisheries data assembled by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) suggest that global marine fisheries catches increased to 86 million tonnes in 1996, then slightly declined. Here, using a decade-long multinational ‘catch reconstruction’ project covering the Exclusive Economic Zones of the world’s maritime countries and the High Seas from 1950 to 2010, and accounting for all fisheries, we identify catch trajectories differing considerably from the national data submitted to the FAO. We suggest that catch actually peaked at 130 million tonnes, and has been declining much more strongly since. This decline in reconstructed catches reflects declines in industrial catches and to a smaller extent declining discards, despite industrial fishing having expanded from industrialized countries to the waters of developing countries. The differing trajectories documented here suggest a need for improved monitoring of all fisheries, including often neglected small-scale fisheries, and illegal and other problematic fisheries, as well as discarded bycatch. Officially reported fisheries statistics suggest that global catches have stabilized since their peak in the mid-1990s. Here, the authors supplement these reported data with best-estimate values of missing data from the literature, and find that global catches have steadily declined over this time period.