Towards Modelling Interventions in Small-Scale Fisheries

Abstract

Interventions often have unintended effects, particularly when they target outcomes in complex social-ecological systems (SES), such as fisheries. Development agencies strive for ‘doing development differently’, because past efforts have often been unsuccessful. The question then is how to do better. Science can make a major contribution here. Its power lies in synthesising and generalising knowledge embedded in ‘thinking tools’ that enable looking at problems from a complex adaptive systems lens. Our approach is to design an agent-based model to understand and reflect on the impact of different types of development interventions in small-scale fisheries. The model embeds synthesised insights from two small-scale fishery cases and from literature on important (loan and entry–exit) dynamics. In short, by modelling a complex socioecological phenomenon such as fishing and trading in small-scale fisheries, the model aims at enabling scientist and practitioners alike to think differently and thereby to support acting differently.