Carrillo, Jose Luis

Successful collective action is crucial for the maintenance and sustainability of our environment and the common-pool resources that underpin it. In fisheries, like in forestry, and water use, successful collective action means interaction, negotiation, and cooperation among stakeholders often with very diverse goals and agendas. How are stakeholders with diverse worldviews able to find common ground? Once they do, if they do, what do those agreements look like? What are the implications for their original agendas and goals? In this presentation, myself an academic along with my colleague, the President of the Mexican Confederation of Fishing Cooperatives, we reflect to provide our answer to those questions in the context of the almost decade long collaboration we have built around the study of the strengths and weaknesses of fishing cooperatives in our country. We reflect how our research methodology has been influenced by the partnership with the fishing sector, what kinds of biases and strengths this has brought. Similarly we reflect on the challenges and opportunities the partnership with academics has brought to the sector’s leadership. In this way we consider how the roles and visions we initially had for each other have changed (or not) over time. We close by discussing what are the main lessons and implications we take from this experience in terms of (a) prospects for future efforts to engage in co-production of knowledge between academia and small-scale producers of food; (b) future policy-making for the sector; (c) and broader policy implications beyond the fishing sector.