Community Resilience in a Changing Environment: Lessons from the Caribbean and Beyond

The notion of resilience has risen to prominence in the academic literature on natural resource management in the last decade. Concepts gathered under the ‘resilience’ banner are characterized by a focus on nonlinear change, unpredictability, thresholds, adaptive management, transformation, institutional learning and vulnerability and adaptation to external drivers (Carpenter et al. 2001; Walker et al. 2002, 2004; Folke et al. 2004; Pikitch et al. 2004; Folke 2006). As complex systems, small scale fisheries exemplify the dynamic and unpredictable interdependence of people and nature. People in small scale fisheries are vulnerable to the compounding effects of stresses within fishery systems, as well as to ecological and economic forces outside their domain of influence. Building the adaptive capacity of ecosystems and of people is, therefore, central to realizing the ecological, social and economic potential of small scale fisheries in the developing world. The real challenge now is to build bridges between the rapid advances in research and analysis and the real world legal, policy and institutional constraints of small scale fisheries management, particularly in developing country contexts. Poverty and vulnerability, dynamic non-equilibrial ecosystems and limited capacity and data combine to make this challenge an important frontier for small scale fisheries research and management.

In this paper, we examine resilience of small scale fisheries in the context of Caribbean coastal fishing communities. Utilizing Ostrom’s (2009) multilevel, nested framework for analyzing outcomes achieved in social-ecological systems (SESs), we examine relationships between four subsystems of an SES – (i) resource systems, (ii) resource units, (iii) governance systems, and (iv) users. In addition, we examine external drivers that impact on the SES and make effect resilience. Two case studies are examined. Factors leading to increased resilience for small scale coastal fishing communities are identified