Journal Article

Many paths, one destination: assessing community options for co-management of marine resources

Ayers, Adam, Datta, Amber, Kittinger, John

2026

Overview

Small-scale fisheries are critically important to millions of people worldwide for livelihood, food security, and lifeways. Despite their importance, effective management is often inhibited by a lack of participation, involvement, and empowerment, as well as the suppression of Indigenous and local agency to steward small-scale fisheries. For small-scale fisheries, co-management has emerged as a promising and potentially beneficial solution that allows communities and the government to share management authority for marine areas. Co-management is associated with better social and ecological outcomes, but there is an implementation gap in developed contexts where most power and authority to manage resources is nested within a state-level bureaucracy. Our research addresses a key question: how can communities evaluate and select the most practical pathway to co-management in these state-centric governance contexts? We investigate this question using a case study of small-scale coral reef fisheries in Hawaiʻi. Our goals are to assess the degree to which these different designations may offer an easier path to co-management implementation for communities and to reduce the transaction costs associated with implementing co-management. We combine institutional analysis, policy analysis, and semi-structured interviews to analyze six different marine management designations in Hawaiʻi. Our analysis revealed that many pathways exist for communities to use existing marine managed areas to collaboratively manage resources with state authorities. This suggests a diversity of institutional arrangements are possible for communities, but the rules that may be established can vary among different management designations. Even with this variability, the state’s rule-making process creates significant costs, which are primarily born by communities. Our stepwise institutional analysis uncovers how existing common-pool resource theories can be combined to assess, enable, and ease co-management planning and implementation and lead to more effective marine resource management transitions.

• Publisher: Resilience Alliance
• Subject: Authority / Bureaucracy / Case studies / co-management / Common lands / Community / community-based management / Coral reefs / Empowerment / Fisheries / Fisheries management / Fishing / Food security / Governance / hawaii / Implementation / Livelihood / Management planning / Marine environment / Marine fish / Marine resources / Marine resources management / pacific islands / Policy analysis / Property rights / Public administration / Resource management / Resources / Small-scale fisheries / state-centric co-management / Transaction costs