Small-scale fisheries are globally important in terms of food and livelihood security, but face key sustainability challenges. These challenges are exacerbated by multi-dimensional and sometimes conflicting management goals such as ecological sustainability, economic efficiency, and poverty reduction. As such, there are disagreements about the effectiveness of different fisheries management approaches, including state regulation, market-based approaches, and collective action approaches, i.e., resource users self-organize to manage fisheries resources. Historically, there has also been a tendency to advocate for one of these approaches as a panacea or silver bullet, regardless of the social, ecological, or institutional context. Emerging empirically driven scientific research on social-ecological interactions in small-scale fisheries can provide guidance regarding which sorts of interventions are most likely to be adopted and succeed. As an important first step to address this, the symposium brings together speakers representing disciplines relevant to this challenge and with different views on these issues. The panel will draw on experiences working within their respective geographies to address the following critical question: Which attributes of small-scale fisheries (social, ecological, and institutional) predict which management approach is likely to be the most successful in a given system?