What is your SIDS Region (Pacific, AIMS or Caribbean)?
Caribbean
Give examples of what actions you are undertaking to reduce poverty, food insecurity and nutrition challenges in response to climate change and climate-related events? Actions can range from informal to formal and include social protection and multisectoral policies, projects, programmes, activities, among others.
Context is necessary. My interests and actions mainly concern research and outreach in marine small-scale fisheries (SSF) and marine protected areas (MPAs). Most are project linked and hence short-term. They have included:
· Promotion of the global SSF Guidelines at regional, national and local levels to strengthen policy
· Policy influence to include SSF and MPAs in regional climate policy and implementation plans
· Capacity development and empowerment through training, learning by doing, fisher exchanges
· Exploration with stakeholders of adaptive MPA governance options to enhance system resilience
· Understanding fisherfolk perceptions of climate and poverty, and views on risk and resilience
· Examining what fisherfolk do to cope with, or adapt to, new perturbations such as sargassum
· Looking at the links between fisherfolk networks, food security and marine resource governance
What lessons have you drawn from building resilience and adaptive capacity of the poor and vulnerable people in the context of climate change and climate-related events?
Some lessons have included:
Fisherfolk normally accept high levels of risk; so understand why rather than make assumptions
Building adaptive capacity is a long-term process more suited to programmes than projects
Conservation interests such as environmental NGOs can unintentionally undermine resilience
Applied academic research needs to be coupled with outreach and advocacy to have an impact
Fisherfolk have little stamina for policy influence as a long term undertaking; need early results
Rates of climate change and variability are likely to far outstrip adoption of adaptive governance
What are the challenges you face in reducing poverty and inequalities and building the adaptive capacity of the poor and vulnerable to climate change and climate related events?
Some of the challenges are:
· Gender, poverty and youth issues receive very little attention in fisheries and are not mainstreamed
· Low capacity for social science in fisheries and MPA authorities limits the types of matters addressed
· Few gender and poverty scholars have an interest in marine natural resource management issues
· Fisherfolk do not usually consider themselves poor although very sensitive to economic inequalities
Several other responses largely elaborate upon the experiences underlying the lessons learned. Much overlap.
What should the world learn from your experience? What are the plausible pathways and good practices you would recommend to follow when addressing poverty, food security and nutrition in the context of climate change and climate-related events?
Lessons learned are set out above. Some are generalizable, but others are more specific to Caribbean culture and social-ecological situations. Pathways are many and need to be adapted to the conditions at different levels on geographic, institutional, jurisdictional and temporal scales. A key principle is institutionalizing a culture of testing, monitoring, evaluating, learning and adapting to test again. Identifying plausible pathways and good practices leading to resilience or transformation for addressing the listed threats requires detailed knowledge of the specific situations to avoid or reduce collateral damage. The primary pathways are those that lead to adaptive capacity and enable improved self-organisation. Good practices need to be participatory but well-informed and strategically aimed at adaptation. Here, well-informed means sufficient to take a reasonable decision and assess the outputs and outcomes against an ideal. Further specifics require context.
I wish to share a few more perspectives from the Caribbean.
Partnering is already in progress to prepare for implementing the SSF Guidelines. An example is between the University of the West Indies, the Caribbean Network of Fisherfolk Organisations and the Caribbean Natural Resources Institute at the regional/transboundary level. National level partnerships are also seen between fisheries authorities and fisherfolk organisations. There needs, however, to be more and much stronger collective action among fisherfolk groups across the region. These groups can accomplish quite a lot if they work together.
Communication to accomplish this collaboration and coordination is challenging due to language and other barriers including cost and low use of internet communication technology amongst fisherfolk. More emphasis needs to be placed on unleashing the power of communication. This includes making allies of the news media and similar organisations in order to influence public opinion and policy.
Challenges and opportunities both need to be approached strategically with well formulated plans that have stakeholder buy-in. The leaders of the fisherfolk organisations and allies need to encourage creativity. The success stories, no matter how small, need to be shared and celebrated. In order to maintain momentum there must be positive outlooks for the short, medium and long term. We must harness collective action for this.
Regards,
Patrick McConney
Patrick McConney
Q1. Although chapter 8 on gender equality may not be considered critical for the Caribbean some fisheries partners formed a Gender In Fisheries Team (GIFT) in 2016 to improve gender mainstreaming as set out in the SSF Guidelines. We have been very encouraged by the interest of both women and men, young and old, fisherfolk and academics. Often the dialogue is about ensuring that all in the fishing industry have a fair chance to succeed and prosper, so gender is only one dimension. In a regional survey, fisherfolk said that fisheries demonstrated gender equality much more than Caribbean society in general, and they were proud of this. We now need good metrics to measure and monitor the situation, particularly since many state and non-state gender agencies ignore our SSF.
Q3. One of the key elements of successful participatory monitoring is ensuring that the process is multi-purpose. That is, it serves several beneficial outcomes to which participants along different segments of the fisheries value chain, or in different fisheries or organisations, can easily relate over a reasonable period. Now there is a tendency to link monitoring to the achievement of the SDGs, but in many places the SDGs are still seen as a state concern removed from daily life. So it would be good to also have simple indicators suitable for multi-year high school curricula so as to facilitate intergenerational interest in monitoring fisheries and fostering stewardship.
Patrick McConney
2. Meaningful and feasible indicators: How can we measure progress?
For the country members of the Caribbean Regional Fisheries Mechanism (CRFM) we are aiming to integrate indicators for the SSF Guidelines into other current or planned monitoring and evaluation schemes. This is to allow regional and sub-regional reporting as well as national. We want to have core indicators that are common to all three levels as well as some specific to each level of governance. This design is similar to the Governance Effectiveness Assessment Framework (GEAF) of the CLME+ Project. We also want to monitor how donor-funded projects are contributing to the implementation of the SSF Guidelines in the same way that many projects now report on their contribution to the SDGs. It is important to avoid asking much more of fisheries authorities and fisherfolk organisations with limited capacities for additional tasks