January 26, 2026 — Governance arrangements that fit social-ecological context help support fishery sustainability.
University of Rhode Island marine affairs professor Mateja Nenadović is the lead author on a new paper in Fish and Fisheries, looking at the management of natural resources via local governance arrangements. Such arrangements range from the collective, such as cooperatives and associations, to the individualistic, such as patrons and owner-operators.
Nenadović and colleagues are researching how these arrangements influence marine resource use and associated outcomes. They theorized that sustainable resource use is not associated with a specific governance arrangement, but instead that every type of arrangement has a certain set of conditions under which sustainability is feasible.
His team investigated this hypothesis by studying coastal marine fisheries in Mexico, focusing on the Baja California Sur region between the Gulf of California and the Pacific Ocean. This is one of the most productive marine ecosystems in the world and important for both people and marine biodiversity. Nenadović has been working with fishers in the region for the past 15 years.
Now, his group’s findings have identified which governance arrangements are best suited to particular contexts. Their results provide the initial building blocks for developing a theory of governance fit, instead of “one size fits all” prescriptions for marine management. Such insights will be relevant to small-scale fisheries globally. These fisheries are a critical provider of global food security, biodiversity conservation and poverty alleviation worldwide.
Nenadović says their findings suggest that there is no single best governance agreement to achieve sustainable resource use. Instead, they found that each of the two dominant governance arrangements evaluated — cooperative and patron — were both associated with sustainable resource use depending on social and environmental conditions.