Seeking sustainability: Employing Ostrom's SESF to explore spatial fit in Maine’s sea urchin fishery

Kimberly L Ovitz,Teresa R Johnson

doi:10.18352/ijc.866

Abstract

Achieving resource sustainability in complex social-ecological systems requires employing place-based management mechanisms congruent with the underlying temporal, spatial, and functional dynamics of the system in question. However, matching management to system dynamics can prove extremely challenging, as has been illustrated in Maine’s sea urchin fishery where fishery managers have struggled to resolve management spatial scale mismatch for over two decades. In Maine, the spatial scale of management far exceeds the relevant spatial dynamics of the urchin resource and leaves fine-scale urchin aggregations in a de facto open access state. These conditions facilitated the serial overharvest of urchin aggregations and resulted in the substantial loss of viable urchin habitat as overharvested areas transitioned to kelp-dominated ecosystem states that inhibit urchin recruitment. Although fishery actors contemplated adopting a number of fine-scale management alternatives to enhance social-ecological fit in the fishery, to date, no such alternatives have been employed. We adopted an ethnographic research approach and conducted semi-structured key informant interviews, document analysis of archived meeting minutes, and participant observation at co-management meetings and restoration events to explore these dynamics from the fishery’s incipience to the present. Following data analysis, we employed Ostrom’s social-ecological systems framework as a diagnostic tool to identify the factors that have influenced management spatial fit in the urchin fishery. Research findings suggest that a number of interacting variables, including harvesters’ heterogeneity and conflicting mental models of the SES, low levels of trust and social capital, and changes in the resource system following collapse impeded collective action necessary to support fine-scale management. However, changing leadership characteristics and increasing horizontal collaboration between harvesters and scientists have positively influenced governance outcomes in recent years and provide a window of opportunity to transition towards a more adaptive and collaborative governance arrangement conducive to addressing problems of fit in the urchin fishery.

Highlights

The widespread decline of global marine resources highlights the vast shortcomings of employing simplified management panaceas in the governance of common pool resources and the complex social-ecological systems (SES) in which they are embedded (e.g. Young et al 2018)
Research findings suggest that a number of interacting variables, including harvesters’ heterogeneity and conflicting mental models of the SES, low levels of trust and social capital, and changes in the resource system following collapse impeded the degree of collective action necessary to support fine-scale management
We found Ostrom’s systems framework (SESF) to be a highly effective tool with which to diagnose the factors that have contributed to persisting spatial scale mismatch in the urchin fishery

Summary

Introduction

The widespread decline of global marine resources highlights the vast shortcomings of employing simplified management panaceas in the governance of common pool resources and the complex social-ecological systems (SES) in which they are embedded (e.g. Young et al 2018). An ideal ecosystem state is an intermediate one, characterized by the cooccurrence of kelp and urchins at various stages of maturity To maintain this state, harvesters must selectively extract high roe-quality urchins from aggregations before they can overgraze available food sources, while leaving behind a sufficient abundance of smaller urchins to prevent the habitat from flipping and locking in a kelp-dominated state (Johnson et al 2012). Harvesters must selectively extract high roe-quality urchins from aggregations before they can overgraze available food sources, while leaving behind a sufficient abundance of smaller urchins to prevent the habitat from flipping and locking in a kelp-dominated state (Johnson et al 2012) These characteristics necessitate that urchin management be employed at an extremely fine spatial scale to prevent the overharvest of discrete aggregations

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Discussion

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