We brought transparency to fisheries, through participation! Learn how.
/
Images and videos by Participation Factory
Last year we joined forces with the Fisheries Transparency Initiative (FiTI) to run a pilot program that set the basis on how to best use hard data (obtained through transparency and accountability efforts) and increase public and stakeholder engagement to make an impact on the creation, implementation and monitoring of fisheries policies.
People Powered partnered with our member Participation Factory (PF) to run the pilot in the Madagascar and Seychelles fisheries sector. In this blog post, we will talk about the process and some of the lessons we learned from it.
Context
For FiTI, making information on fisheries available is a starting point to get to their ultimate goal: to ensure the use of such information for improving how the fisheries sector is managed, to facilitate better engagement of the fishermen communities and stakeholders in collection, validation, and use of information, and to enable stakeholders to construct strategies for the sector in the long run, respecting sustainability and social aspects in fisheries. This will allow governments and stakeholders to design and implement better fishery policies for the public interest.
In the words of Katya Petrikevich, Co-Founder of Participation Factory:
“One of the major challenges identified in early FiTI implementations, such as in Seychelles and Madagascar, is that an increase in public information does not directly lead to more (non-governmental) stakeholder involvement in public policy-making. Not even is it always clearly defined what the purpose of calls for more participation is, why an increase in participation is seen as beneficial, or who should actually be involved in such participatory processes in fisheries.”
During this pilot, Participation Factory worked together with representatives of the Multi-Stakeholder Groups (business representatives, national governments, and civil society) to run a diagnostics of the status quo, identify needs and opportunities, and then create a list of recommendations for improving participation in policy-making supported by evidence in both Seychelles and Madagascar. These recommendations were then communicated to the local Ministries of Fisheries, and their staff worked closely with PF through capacity-building activities and consultations to ensure the implementation of the recommendations developed by the Multi-Stakeholder Groups.
Seychelles
After several months of working closely with the FiTI National Multi-Stakeholder Group and the Ministry of Fisheries and Blue Economy in Seychelles, the Participation Factory team provided recommendations that included executing a citizens’ assembly in the Seychelles. The purpose of this participatory democracy exercise is to help create a new disruptive vision of the fisheries sector in Seychelles, one that allows citizens to understand the importance of the fishing industry in their lives and to play a role in making it more sustainable and inclusive.
Madagascar
In the case of Madagascar, the team found that the structures for participation were still young. The team collaborated with the Multi-Stakeholder Group and the members of the local Ministries involved in the FiTI agenda, to identify the need to ensure institutionalization of FITI. They also concluded that work was necessary for the creation of complementary and interconnected national and regional stakeholder platforms where all groups and entities related to fisheries could come together for dialogue, information sharing, and decision-making. This new structure must have a participatory mechanism for obtaining and sharing information among its participants and their communities.
Learnings and next steps
The task we had at hand proved way more difficult than what we had expected from the start. On the one hand, there was a ton of previous work that the FiTI team and local Ministry of Fisheries had already done in creating dialogue spaces and gathering information concerning the state of fisheries in both Seychelles and Madagascar.
On the other, bringing the “transparency and participation combo” to the world of fisheries meant having to face challenges from these two realms at the same time. For instance, the lack of institutionalization of some processes and the heterogeneity of circumstances between Seychelles and Madagascar made applying the same strategy to both places difficult. The PF team had to do some adaptations to fit the local conditions. This resulted in different execution times and different recommendations in each place.
Despite the difficulties, the results of this pilot gave us a solid foundation to move forward and find ways to replicate this model elsewhere. The lessons we learned in Seychelles and Madagascar tell us that, while every community is in a different stage of development when it comes to transparency and participatory decision-making, it is also true that all communities will significantly benefit from adopting the sort of recommendations that we created for these two cases. We recommend that:
By adopting participatory democracy mechanisms as the way to decide on policy and its implementation, we can make sure that the needs and voices of the communities directly involved in the world of fisheries around the world are heard and turned into actionable items.
By institutionalizing participatory mechanisms and structures, we ensure that these survive throughout time, regardless of leadership and political changes. This brings stability, accountability and reliability to the system.
In the words of Sven Biermann, Executive Director of the Fisheries Transparency Initiative:
“We all understand that government transparency is a prerequisite for effective participation. But we need to move beyond generic calls for inclusive governance or assuming that transparency automatically leads to better stakeholder involvement. Instead, we need to ask how participation should be organized, for which topics in fisheries, by whom, and for what purposes? This pilot with People Powered and Participation Factory produced important lessons on the complexity of participation in fisheries. We must now take these experiences and ensure that other FiTI-implementing countries can benefit from them.”
For now, we will focus our work on finding other communities that could gain from replicating and going beyond the scope of the pilot project we ran last year. If you know of any such community or would like to partner with us to make this happen, do not hesitate to contact us!