Transdisciplinary analysis of Pacific tuna fisheries: A research framework for understanding and governing oceans as social-ecological systems

Abstract

Western and Central Pacific (WCP) tuna fisheries are faced with complex and interlinked social and ecological challenges including high seas management issues, setting sustainable limits, human rights violations, and illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) activities. However, strong but narrow disciplinary science persist to dominate governance. Effective governance across complex multi-scale systems in the WCP tuna fishery requires a more integrated understanding of social-ecological systems (SES). Transdisciplinary problem solving informed by participatory, social-ecological resilience research, and political ecology has the potential to reveal complicated interactions and connections across ocean SES networks. Social-Ecological-Oceans Systems Framework (SECO) was developed to capture the breadth and depth of the system and address interactions and connections between separate system components. SECO develops a practical integrated approach using accessible methods for addressing a large complex ocean system such as the WCP tuna fisheries. The framework offers a rapid transdisciplinary assessment and opens space for their deeper transdisciplinary analyses. This exploratory framework, as the WCP tuna case example shows, starts to reveal issues at scales that are not likely to be addressed by the strong single disciplinary approaches to governance now prevailing. The transdisciplinary research approach was developed to be responsive to diverse participants’ knowledge, including local communities, scientists (social and biophysical), industry experts, economists, and fisheries managers. SECO was applied to place-specific studies, Suva, Fiji and Honiara and Gizo, Solomon Islands in the WCP tuna fishery. This validated SECO to ensure robustness and reliability.