Melissa Marschke

Adaptive co‐management for social–ecological complexity

Building trust through collaboration, institutional development, and social learning enhances efforts to foster ecosystem management and resolve multi-scale society–environment dilemmas. One emerging approach aimed at addressing these dilemmas is adaptive co-management. This method draws explicit attention to the learning (experiential and experimental) and collaboration (vertical and horizontal) functions necessary to improve our understanding of, and ability to respond to, complex social–ecological systems. Here, we identify and outline the core features of adaptive co-management, which include innovative institutional arrangements and incentives across spatiotemporal scales and levels, learning through complexity and change, monitoring and assessment of interventions, the role of power, and opportunities to link science with policy.

Making social sense of aquaculture transitions

Resilience deals explicitly with change and provides a middle ground between the social and the environmental sciences. However, a growing critique by social scientists questions the ability of resilience thinking to adequately examine the social dimensions of change. The question that emerges is how social scientists should engage with resilience. We addressed this question by comparing resilience with agrarian change and transitions theory, through the backdrop of the fastest growing global food sector, aquaculture. Our analysis showed that each theoretical perspective provides fundamentally different insights into social and environmental transition inherent in the aquaculture sector. Although resilience thinking is best suited to assessing the ecological aspects of production, its systems ontology limits the inclusion of dynamic social relations or innovation. In contrast, agrarian transition enables a more meaningful understanding of how social relations are reconfigured as agrarian society shifts toward more capitalist modes of production, and transitions theory provides insights into social process of innovation. Given the epistemological differences between these theoretical approaches, we argue against attempts that reify systemic thinking by naturalizing social theories and concepts into resilience thinking. Instead, we argue that social theories such as agrarian change and transition theory should be seen as complimentary and that integration should focus on bridging results and insights. Doing so enables a more robust assessment of the social aspects of social-ecological transitions in the aquaculture sector and beyond.

Modern day slavery in Thai fisheries: academic critique, practical action

In the summer of 2014, major news outlets broke stories on what they labeled “slave labor” practices among the more than 100,000 Burmese and Cambodian migrants working in Thailand’s marine fisherie...

Labor, social sustainability and the underlying vulnerabilities of work in Southeast Asia’s seafood value chains

The seafood industry, comprised of capture fisheries, aquaculture and their supporting value chains, plays a major role in the economy and society of Southeast Asia. Fish is the most important source of animal protein in many countries in the region (Belton and Thilsted 2014) and plays a central role in cuisine and culture in both inland and coastal areas. Expansion of the region’s seafood sector has seen sustained increases in capture fisheries output and, more recently, the meteoric rise of aquaculture, with reported growth in the two sub-sectors averaging 2.9 percent and 9.7 percent per annum, respectively since 1990 (Figure 25.1). Fish make vital contributions to livelihoods and nutrition in vulnerable rural and coastal communities, but are also important to the urban middle class, whose growth – to include a projected 66 percent of the region’s population by 2030 (Kharas 2010) – is likely to result in even higher levels of demand for seafood products (Hall et al. 2011). The region is also a major supplier of seafood exports, such as farmed shrimp and wild caught tuna, to the Global North.

Assessing the potential of a low-carbon future for Cambodia

This paper examines Cambodias current carbon pathway and considers if Cambodia could move towards a low carbon future. We do so by examining two of Cambodias largest carbon emitting sectors: energy and transportation. We argue that Cambodia has a unique window of opportunity to pursue a low carbon pathway given that, despite significant economic growth, the country is currently producing less CO2 per capita compared to most other countries across Asia. Cambodia could benefit greatly (in economic, social, and environmental terms) from adopting a low carbon pathway. Promising harbingers are present, such as recent shifts to hydropower, adoption of urban master plans, and citizen frustration with traffic congestion and poor air quality that may enable public buy-in for innovative low-carbon solutions. Achieving this will require sharpened and harmonized policy, approaching all planning activities from a low-carbon perspective, and support (both institutional and financial) from regional bodies and multilat...