Explaining the decline in Swedish Baltic Sea small-scale fisheries : A historical analysis of fishers in their social and ecological context

Swedish fisheries, as many other European fisheries are characterized by overcapacity. Efforts trying to reduce the overcapacity have led to fewer but bigger vessels. Hence, fish catches are aggregated among fewer and fewer fishers with bigger and bigger boats while problems with overcapacity remain. Instead, it is the fishers with smaller vessels that faced major declines and the Swedish Baltic Sea small-scale fisheries (SSF) have been identified to soon disappear. A disappearance would be unfortunate because SSF represent values that could be used in the development towards more ecological and social sustainable fisheries. The decline of SSF appears to be structural persistent, produced by factors interacting over time. To address the negative trend, it is essential to know how and why the decline became structural persistent. The objective of this study is therefore to investigate the long-term historical development of the SSF as a social-ecological system. A mixed-method approach was used to assess and identify interactions between fishers and contextual factors over time. The results show how the decline became structurally persistent in 1960s after a conjunction in time where fishers’ livelihood became more dependent upon fisheries while fish abundance started to decline. After the conjunction fishers became trapped within a system where social and ecological contextual factors constrained their fishing practices. This thesis provides new insights on the difficult situation in which SSF are currently trapped. These insights can be used for future development of Swedish fisheries, which needs to move away from increased economic optimization and instead enhance long-term sustainability

Stewardship in Swedish Baltic small-scale fisheries : A study on the social-ecological dynamics of local resource use

Sustainability scholars frequently advocate for stewardship as a strategy to foster sustainable development. Stewardship broadly refers to the wise and responsible use of nature, and is considered necessary to ensure the long-term wellbeing of humans and that of life in general. In the academic literature local resource users, like hunters, farmers or fishers, are widely acknowledged to act as stewards of the natural environments their livelihoods depend upon. Research shows that this group of people often are able to use natural resources in a sustainable manner, and that their knowledge of how to do so can improve natural resource management. However, research also emphasizes how different local resource users have different potential to steward natural environments. There is thus a need to better understand what stewardship among local resource users entails more concretely as well as when and how it fosters environmental sustainability. In this thesis, I study stewardship in the case of Swedish Baltic small-scale fisheries. I conceptualize stewardship as an interaction between fishers and the social-ecological context in which they are embedded. This conceptualization implies that stewardship does not exist or emerge from within fishers themselves, but is created, formed and realized through fishing practices. I further define and analyze stewardship using a framework composed of three dimensions: care, agency and knowledge. My findings are contained in four papers. Paper I presents a theoretical model of how local resource users respond to social and ecological change, and shows the model’s empirical relevance. Paper II gives an overview of the diversity and development within present-day Swedish Baltic small-scale fisheries. Paper III investigates the historical development of a Swedish fishery that targets the critically endangered European eel (Anguilla anguilla). Paper IV focuses on fishers’ knowledge and assesses how this knowledge can be applied in fisheries science and management. The papers collectively demonstrate the contextual nature of stewardship and showcase how stewardship varies over time as well as between fishers. The findings illustrate the ambiguous link between stewardship and environmental sustainability, they support the notion that fishers’ knowledge can improve fisheries management, while also suggesting that future research needs to pay more attention to how stewardship is empirically manifested. Overall, the thesis advances the understanding of stewardship by highlighting the social-ecological dynamics of local resource use.At the time of the doctoral defense, the following paper was unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 4: Manuscript.</p

Teoría de la educación : educación y cultura en la sociedad de la información

Resumen basado en el de la publicaciónUno de los aspectos más interesantes en la formación inicial en informática en el contexto universitario es la diversidad de experiencias y competencias de los alumnos. A fin de percibir la evolución de la utilización del ordenador en el tramo de edad de los 10 a los 19 años de los jóvenes portugueses, se elabora un cuestionario sobre: utilización del ordenador, contexto, tipo de equipamiento; acceso a Internet, modalidad, actividades desarrolladas, tiempo, contexto; programas de chat, redes sociales y blog; control de su uso por parte de sus padres, modalidad; formación en Tecnologías de la Información y de la Comunicación (TIC). A partir de una muestra de 390 jóvenes portugueses los datos fueron tratados para permitir comparaciones en función de los grupos de edad 10-12 años, 13-15 años y 16-19 años. La información recogida permite elaborar un cuadro evolutivo de las competencias de los jóvenes, así como tener una idea aproximada del uso de las TIC en los sujetos que inician la universidad.Castilla y LeónES

Human responses to social-ecological traps

Social-ecological (SE) traps refer to persistent mismatches between the responses of people, or organisms, and their social and ecological conditions that are undesirable from a sustainability perspective. Until now, the occurrence of SE traps is primarily explained from a lack of adaptive capacity; not much attention is paid to other causal factors. In our article, we address this concern by theorizing the variety of human responses to SE traps and the effect of these responses on trap dynamics. Besides (adaptive) capacities, we theorize desires, abilities and opportunities as important additional drivers to explain the diversity of human responses to traps. Using these theoretical concepts, we construct a typology of human responses to SE traps, and illustrate its empirical relevance with three cases of SE traps: Swedish Baltic Sea fishery; amaXhosa rural livelihoods; and Pamir smallholder farming. We conclude with a discussion of how attention to the diversity in human response to SE traps may inform future academic research and planned interventions to prevent or dissolve SE traps

Informing obligations : Best practice information for catch‐and‐release in Swedish local recreational fisheries management

Catch-and-release (C&amp;R) is a popular management tool that can support sustainable development of recreational fisheries, if anglers adopt scientifically informed “best practices.” However, although the role of best practices is widely established in the academic literature, this knowledge is not always disseminated to anglers. In this paper, we investigated if and to what extent local management organizations provided best practice information to anglers. Based on a sample of 331 Swedish organizations, we reviewed the websites through which these organizations sold fishing licenses. Our review demonstrated widespread use of C&amp;R as a management tool yet a general lack of best practice information. Among the small fraction of organizations that mentioned best practices, most mentioned only a single practice, with little consistency among practices that received attention. In addition, best practice information was particularly lacking for pike (Esox Lucius) and perch (Perca fluviatilis), which are by far the most landed and released species nationally. We discovered major knowledge deficiencies that provide insights about where and how to focus efforts for improving best practice information, in the context of local recreational fisheries management