Fisher responses to private monitoring interventions in an Indonesian tuna handline fishery

Abstract

Information is central to the assessment and regulation of fisheries, yet underreporting remains a persistent problem, especially in the small-scale and developing country fisheries. Private actors, using a variety of enumeration approaches and technologies, have started to supplement government enumeration programs to meet a range of reporting obligations. This paper introduces a social practices approach to understand the response of fishers to private enumeration interventions. We base our analysis on the introduction of landing enumeration, fisher logbooks and Spot Trace devices by the Indonesian NGO, Masyarakat dan Perikanan Indonesia (MDPI) in a Fair Trade USA certified handline tuna fishery in Eastern Indonesia. The results show how a social practices approach offers a grounded understanding of responses to monitoring interventions that extends beyond conventional analyses of fishery-dependent data collection. The paper concludes that understanding data collection as a set of socially mediated practices that intervene in established fishing and landing practices can help to improve the design of fisheries data collection.