Nothing about small-scale fisheries is actually small. About 90 percent of the world’s 120 million capture fishers are involved in what we’ll call SSF, making it the world’s largest creator of marine jobs, as well as an economic activity that supports the food security of millions.

As the human population living by or near the coast continues to increase, the role of SSF is becoming even more important. Small-scale fisheries are extremely diverse, ranging from traditional, customary, and indigenous fishing practices to near-shore, semi-industrialized fishing. For the most part, fishers are members of coastal communities, and spend their earnings in the same places they live.

The governance problems affecting the SSF sector are not small either. The most common challenges relate to a lack of financial and legal certainty, training, adequate data to improve management, and commercial know-how, as well as an absence of funding for addressing reforms.

Seeking to provide guidance on how to promote a more sustainable SSF sector, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations published the “Voluntary Guidelines for Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries.” This document stresses the close connection among ocean governance, environmental stewardship, and the central role of fisheries for protecting the human rights and economic security of tens of thousands of small-scale fishing communities around the world.

Building on this connection between environmental sustainability and human rights in the SSF context, ELI developed the Small Scale-Fisheries Law and Governance Toolkit, implemented in partnership with Parliamentarians for Global Action, a global network of policymakers focused on promoting human rights.

In many instances, a knowledge gap exists between promoting sustainability practices and implementing these goals on the ground through regulatory procedures. The toolkit bridges this divide by identifying useful regulatory approaches for SSF governance, with a special focus on fisheries co-management, and provides this information in the form of model legal language so that others may review and adapt provisions to the legal framework of a specific country or region.

For this project, ELI draws from its experience reviewing environmental laws around the world for the “First Environmental Rule of Law” report, published in 2019 in partnership with UN Environment. The report found that most laws that promote sustainability struggle with implementation and enforcement. Laws lack clear mandates, insert concepts that are not developed, or introduce policy approaches that are not tailored to the needs and conditions on the ground.

Zooming in on the management of fisheries reveals similar challenges. Many fisheries laws have inserted the concept of “sustainability” without elaborating on how to translate that concept into governance institutions and regulatory procedures. Although a fisheries act may mention, for example, “community participation in governance,” the local community may not know how to exercise that right, and the government agent does not know how to enable that process. This is where legal analysis can prove useful by generating actionable rules and identifiable processes based on research.

The toolkit starts by presenting a methodology for assessing the need for regulatory reforms with a specific lens on the challenges and needs of the SSF community. Given the central role of co-management in sustainable SSF governance, the toolkit focuses on creating and implementing co-management systems, along with two basic governance elements that strengthen them: exclusive fishing rights for SSF communities and the creation of exclusive zones for SSF. Remaining sections address fundamental elements for enhancing the likelihood of success for a sustainable SSF co-management scheme: strengthening compliance, overcoming the conceptual opposition between fisheries and marine protected areas, and making SSF governance compatible with other area-based ocean management approaches.

The ELI team’s goal was to make the model legal language included in the toolkit specific enough to help advance the issue of sustainable governance with detailed models, yet general enough so that the language can be applied to different contexts and legal systems. In other words, the toolkit should help policymakers answer the question, Can my country’s legal framework provide better guidance to achieve these objectives? The resource then provides a few examples on how to operationalize that governance challenge.