Trade relations in small-scale fisheries have long been studied as more than economic exchanges. Relational economic sociology and relational economic geography have shown the importance of social relations and space in understanding trade relations. We argue that the recent relational turn in sustainability science adds a focus on the social-ecological aspects of fishery trade chain dynamics, worth investigating further. We propose to use the relational concept of assemblage to put the three perspectives into dialogue, which we argue contributes to understand the complexity of economic exchanges in small-scale fisheries. We justify and illustrate these arguments through the case of Magweva in the island of KaNyaka in Mozambique. Magweva are women traders whose role and importance have been poorly investigated. In sum, we aim at fulfilling three objectives: first, to put into dialogue relational economic sociology, relational economic geography, and the relational sustainability science to showcase the value of associating these three perspectives to sustainability scientists interested in small-scale fisheries; second, we provide an empirical application of the concept of assemblage to small-scale fisheries as a concrete way of studying distributed agency; third, we aim at highlighting the role of Magweva, women fish traders, thus contributing to the small-scale fisheries literature calling attention to the often invisible role women play in maintaining trade networks.

Democracies struggle to translate sustainability science, and public concern into sufficiently transformative actions. Ongoing polarization, politicization and disinformation extenuate this challenge. Some scholars suggest that deliberative democratic innovations can help to bridge science, public understanding and will formation, and policy implementation in the face of vested interests. In light of these challenges, we introduce deliberative mini-publics (DMPs), and why they are of interest to sustainability scientists. DMPs are distinguished from participatory methods more familiar to sustainability scientists by their random and stratified selection of ‘ordinary citizens’. An emphasis is also placed on facilitated deliberation, access to information and learning. Evidence shows that the particular conditions of DMPs can support more deliberative and informed reasoning and offer a considered public voice for decision-makers, fellow citizens and sustainability scientists. However, evidence of their wider effect on society and sustainability is mixed and warrants further examination. We draw on examples from emerging research and experience of DMPs to conceptualize three broad mechanisms for how they could potentially enhance the relationship between sustainability science, publics and politics. These differ based on whether they are primarily aiming to (1) inform policy-makers, (2) support public discourse, or (3) enhance transdisciplinary science. We also explore whether DMPs can challenge unsustainable systems and contribute to transformation through visioning, strategizing transitions, and scrutinizing the decisions of public agencies. We encourage experimentation and critical research on DMPs for sustainability transformations to test and better understand their potential.

Sustainability scientists have engaged in extensive discussions on ethical ways of doing research and argued on the importance of co-production approaches to counter knowledge extractivism. The specific issue of research fatigue, often associated with knowledge extractivism, and the possible methods to counter it, have however received less attention. This paper seeks to contribute to discussions on ethical ways of doing research by focusing on our experience of using theatre, specifically, Forum Theatre, to investigate divergent perceptions of environmental change and related tensions among selected coastal communities in Kenya and Mozambique. We argue that Forum Theatre constitutes an ethical method for sustainability scientists for four reasons: (i) it allows to co-produce knowledge with participants; (ii) it facilitates horizontal exchange; (iii) it creates joyful moments; and (iv) it enables the transmission of skills that remain with participants beyond project durations. The paper engages with these four themes, first theoretically and then proposing a reflection based on our project experience. In the last section, we warn against some of the limitations of the approach.

Governing sustainability challenges such as climate change or biodiversity loss presents a profound democratic dilemma. Although democratic practices and procedures are widely regarded as essential for collectively addressing complex sustainability issues, liberal democracies have been criticized by some scholars for their inability to effectively tackle global environmental threats like climate change. We reconcile these positions by outlining how the emerging field of democratic innovations can help to address the critical challenges that democracies face when governing sustainability transformations. We focus on three issues liberal democracies are confronted with: reformist incrementalism, (de)politicization, and imaginary boundaries. We then exemplify how democratic innovations such as deliberative mini-publics, participatory budgeting, and material participation can help address these challenges. Our review suggests that democratic innovations hold the potential to address political concerns, find compromises between extreme positions, reconnect people’s everyday lives with the grand sustainability challenges they face, and allow for alternative visions of a desirable future society. However, we also address cautionary tales, discuss the limitations of democratic innovations, and outline avenues for future research, which we believe can help further elaborate and develop participatory approaches to critical sustainability challenges.

Small-scale fisheries are likely to experience a higher frequency and magnitude of environmental and socioeconomicchange because of increasing climate shocks and pressures that result from them, as well as because of the influence of global marketdynamics. Fisheries' responses to the impacts of global change are often influenced by relations between fishers and traders. Suchrelations constitute a link between markets, fishers, and the marine ecosystems. However, the ways that fisher-trader relations respondto global change, influencing the adaptive capacities of small-scale fisheries are poorly understood. Addressing this gap in this paper,we explore how fisher-trader relations, embedded within other social, ecological, and social-ecological relations, mediate change, suchas disasters, new policies, or market demand. We do this by mapping the interactions that shape the mediating role of the fisher-traderrelations in five case studies of small-scale fisheries. Synthesizing among the case studies we develop a typology of combinations ofrelations, their roles, and characteristics that influence the capacity of small-scale fisheries to respond to abrupt, slow, and cyclicalchange, resulting in absorbing or reinforcing its effects. Particularly we show how fisher-trader relations can generate the capacity tomaintain livelihoods and form new relations when exposed to disruptive change and the capacity to increase supply in response to newmarket opportunities. The findings highlight the importance of studying responses to change in small-scale fisheries through the lensof relations and combinations of relations rather than individual behaviors. Future research on this topic could explore how theidentified patterns of relations, including fisher-trader relations, may mediate change in other socio-cultural and social-ecologicalcontexts, and when exposed to different types of disturbances.

How climate change is framed within CAs is critical for both the democratic legitimacy and transformative potential of CAs. Narrow technical frames can exclude valid perspectives and policy options and close down debate on broader systemic and potentially more transformative issues. Conversely, such 'system-supporting' framings may yield more specific and applicable policy recommendations, increasing the likelihood of implementation. In this study, we present a framework and approach to analyse framings in climate assemblies. We apply this framework to examine the evidence provided to a German, a UK and a Global citizen assembly. Our analysis suggests that despite differences in scale, remit and commissioning bodies, evidence in these three assemblies had a similar range of framings. General evidence most frequently incorporated frames related to safety, governance, and fairness. Although all assemblies incorporated some degree of system-challenging frames, many of them were used little. Topic-specific evidence on energy in both the German and UK assemblies almost exclusively used energy technologies frames, potentially at the expense of critical perspectives. Interestingly, we did not observe major differences in the amount of system-challenging frames used between the assemblies commissioned by civil society actors and those commissioned by parliament; however, we observed some differences in the way some frames were used. We propose that integrating system-challenging frames with actionable steps could enhance the transformative potential of future assemblies. Our framework can be used to study how the framing of evidence influences deliberations and outcomes and to assess assemblies' claims to provide balanced information.

Abstract Marine protected areas like periodic closures are increasingly used to improve both fisheries management and biodiversity conservation, and often secondarily, human well‐being. Yet rule breaking, whether formal regulations, or community‐agreed norms, continues to negate expected management and conservation outcomes, remaining a major challenge. Although compliance scholarship today is expanding beyond non‐economic explanations of (non)‐compliance behaviour, approaches and theory used fail to show the diversity of perceptions and dispositions that can underpin motivations. A deepening engagement with behavioural sciences like sociology, psychology or behavioural economics is increasingly recognized as key in tackling compliance issues in marine protected areas. In this paper, we contribute to such a strand of compliance scholarship by presenting the responses and positions to (non‐) compliance, rules/regulations and authorities of different people, for example, fishers, traders and others involved in an area‐based fishery management intervention in Zanzibar, Tanzania. We take a qualitative approach aligning with an interpretive research ethic to carry out story circles, photo‐elicitation tasks and focus groups at three sites enacting periodic octopus closures. Theory drawn from sociology, anthropology and cognitive sciences was used to interpret how participants justified were motivated by or dispositioned towards rules, rule makers and rule breakers. Generally, the area‐management intervention was supported by participants, signalling the potential for future compliance most commonly based on the recognition of a degraded marine ecosystem in need of protection. However, the diverse and dynamic responses by different livelihood groups (i.e. traders and fishers) indicated on which basis and through which logics compliance behaviour was condoned or legitimated. This type of insight can help managers gauge or anticipate the potential for non‐compliance in participatory approaches that can impact the health of marine ecosystems. Recommendations include providing discussion spaces for conservation participants' (not just fishermen or fishery organizations) own meanings to be understood and not assumed. Meanings which create and shape relations, actions and concepts in marine protected area processes and thus directly impact the uptake and sustainability of conservation interventions. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

Local access to "wild,"common-pool terrestrial and aquatic resources is being diminished by global resource demand and large-scale conservation interventions. Many theories suggest the well-being of wild harvesters can be supported through transitions to other livelihoods, improved infrastructure, and market access. However, new theories argue that such benefits may not always occur because they are context dependent and vary across dimensions of well-being. We test these theories by comparing how wild harvesting and other livelihoods have been associated with food security and life satisfaction in different contexts across similar to 10,800 households in the tropics. Wild harvests coincided with high well-being in remote, assetpoor, and less-transformed landscapes. Yet, overall, well-being increased with electrical infrastructure, proximity to cities, and household capitals. This provides large-scale confirmation of the context dependence of nature's contributions to people, and suggests a need to maintain local wild resource access while investing in equitable access to infrastructure, markets, and skills.

Small islands are highly dependent on their natural endowments. Because of this dependency, they are more vulnerable to climate change. This paper builds on the assumption that a better understanding of the meaning of climate change in specific local contexts (from localized perspectives) opens up possibilities for climate change adaptations. Based on literature reviews, semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions and forum theatre performances, the paper provides various perceptions of climate change effects from KaNyaka Island in Mozambique. It endeavors to further build the case for the integration of everyday-life experiences and observations of environmental processes in developing collective responses to climate change. The study does so by looking at the way island inhabitants, who are particularly vulnerable to climate change, perceive this phenomenon. The paper argues that the KaNyaka residents are part of local ecologies in which physical and spiritual worlds are entangled in everyday life. It also avers that for a better understanding and response to the adverse effects of climate change on the island, scientists at large must approach local communities as co-producers of knowledge. This relational approach allows the incorporation of worldviews that have been key in sustaining enfolding relationships between people and local ecology. It concludes that this approach opens the possibility of adaptation to climate change as an embedded socio-environmental phenomenon.

Millions of households globally rely on uncultivated ecosystems for their livelihoods. However, much of the understanding about the broader contribution of uncultivated ecosystems to human wellbeing is still based on a series of small-scale studies due to limited availability of large-scale datasets. We pooled together 11 comparable datasets comprising 232 settlements and 10,971 households in ten low-and middle-income countries, representing forest, savanna and coastal ecosystems to analyse how uncultivated nature contributes to multi-dimensional wellbeing and how benefits from nature are distributed between households. The resulting dataset integrates secondary data on rural livelihoods, multidimensional human wellbeing, household demographics, resource tenure and social-ecological context, primarily drawing on nine existing household surveys and their associated contextual information together with selected variables, such as travel time to cities, population density, local area GDP and land use and land cover from existing global datasets. This integrated dataset has been archived with ReShare (UK Data Service) and will be useful for further analyses on nature-wellbeing relationships on its own or in combination with similar datasets.

Abstract As sustainability scientists increasingly put forward the relevance of process‐relational approaches to make sense of social‐ecological phenomena, an inquiry on which methods would fit a process‐relational approach is necessary. This paper discusses how a process‐relational approach can be applied to traditional qualitative research methods, namely interviews and coding and the tensions associated with it. Process‐relational perspectives share commonalities with interpretative approaches but also present specific characteristics, such as the importance of material aspects and the understanding of the phenomenon as a moment in which different elements become defined respective to each other. The paper uses data and researchers' experiences from an action research project seeking to support collective action among coastal communities affected by environmental changes in Kenya and Mozambique. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

Our study of periodic octopus closures helps to fill an empirical gap in community-based marine protected area (MPA) research on socially-diverse multidimensional wellbeing impacts. Human wellbeing provides a more meaningful and holistic measure of social impacts than previous economic measures while recognising equity- evidence that ultimately ensures support and enables long-term success in conservation. We trace the flow of benefits, costs and burdens from closures at three sites in Zanzibar and explore how different types of fishers and traders perceive impacts. This is done at a personal, livelihood group and village or community level, as well as in terms of ecosystem effects. Storytelling, photo-elicitation tasks and focused discussions prioritized participants' emic descriptions and understandings of closures. We iteratively, qualitatively coded data using a three-dimensional (material, relational and subjective) social wellbeing approach. Despite different conditions and histories at the three sites, participants identified similar wellbeing attributes as affected by the closure. Themes included social conflict, non-compliance, income, education, food/nutrition, and communal benefits reflecting recent literature on MPAs and human wellbeing. Perceptions of inequity cross cut all three dimensions and gender was a strong dimension that emphasized procedural and distributional inequity between different types of livelihood groups e.g. small-scale traderwomen and male skindivers. Material wellbeing losses due to poor market environments highlighted how better alignment is needed between periodic closure activities and resulting value chain dynamics. Opening events intensely impacted wellbeing across all dimensions, suggesting that these moments are critical for creating positive perceptions or losing support for closures.

Life satisfaction is both a desirable 'end' for sustainable development, and a means to understand the priorities, and behaviour of people towards local ecosystems. Ecosystem-services research on life satisfaction has focused on cultural services in wealthy, Western contexts, although ecosystem services are essential for poor people's livelihoods in the Global South. We examined reported life satisfaction from a survey of over 2000 people in rural and urban settings of coastal Kenya and Mozambique. We coded respondents' open-ended reasons for their reported satisfaction, and used multiple correspondence analysis to explore the characteristics of people who mentioned different reasons. We tested associations between satisfaction and the meeting of basic needs and income, with binary logistic regression, accounting for site and gender. Life satisfaction was lower in Kenya, for men, and in the most urbanised site. Respondents explained high, and low, satisfaction in terms of social relationships, basic needs, money and employment. They rarely mentioned the ecosystem services and related livelihoods that underpin those, suggesting an instrumental relation to nature. Meeting basic needs, including economic security better predicted satisfaction than household income. Life satisfaction reflected material differences in people's lives but also different evaluative criteria and national cultures. For example, family reasons more commonly explained women's satisfaction, while money was more important for urban-dwelling men. We propose that the holistic perspective offered by life-satisfaction research can inform environmental management alongside more focused ecosystem-service research. For example, our results suggest that a) interventions should recognise immediate needs and social relationships, b) the role of ecosystem services for subjective wellbeing varies by local culture and individual identities and c) secure and fair access to ecosystem services may support life satisfaction better than high incomes that are insecure or inequitably distributed.

Global resource demand and large-scale conservation interventions are diminishing tropical communities’ access to food, fiber, fodder and fuel from wild (e.g. uncultivated) resources. Theory disagrees on whether the wellbeing of wild harvesting households will thus be diminished, or if it can be improved by a transition to non-wild livelihoods and other economic development. Here we present a cross-sectional analysis identifying in which contexts households with non-wild livelihoods have experienced superior food security and life satisfaction across the tropics, and vice versa—contexts where wild harvesting continues to be associated with better outcomes. Using a dataset of ~10,800 households representative of diverse peri-urban and rural development tropical contexts, we model that in 2015, ~650 million people in the region were directly harvesting wild resources. Regardless of livelihood type, the wellbeing outcomes of all households increased with electrical infrastructure, proximity to cities and household capitals. Non-wild harvesters achieved superior outcomes in most, but not all, contexts. Wild harvesters maintained relatively high outcomes in more remote and less converted areas, and amongst households with lower physical capital (cultivated land, productive assets). Our results suggest that while reduced access to wild resources is more likely to disrupt the wellbeing of remote and less capitalized households, overall improvements to wellbeing have historically been associated with improved access to infrastructure, markets and other household capitals. Our results thus support policies that balance maintaining access to wild resources while pursuing sustainable and equitable longer-term improvements in services, infrastructure and markets.

Breaking of rules, whether formal regulations, or community agreed norms, remains one of the most widespread challenges to sustainable use of marine ecosystems. Non-compliance is especially difficult in small-scale fisheries as it can undermine the provision of nutrition and livelihoods to the many millions dependent worldwide. Although fishery compliance scholarship today is expanding beyond non-economic explanations of (non)-compliance behaviour, approaches and theory used fail to show the diversity of perceptions and dispositions that can underpin motivations. Thus a fuller understanding is lacking towards addressing the acute need for increased fisheries compliance. This paper takes a Zanzibari case of a rapidly spreading community-based intervention - periodic octopus closures - to explore compliance outcomes amongst a diverse range of participants. We take a qualitative approach aligning with an interpretive paradigm to carry out story circles, photo elicitation tasks and focus groups at three sites in 2019. Two sociological strands of theory were used to interpret how participants justify, are motivated by or dispositioned towards rules, rule-makers and rule-breakers. Generally the intervention was supported, signalling the potential for future compliance most commonly based on recognition of a degraded marine ecosystem in need of protection. However the diverse and dynamic responses by groups indicated on which basis and through which logics compliance behaviour was condoned or legitimated. This type of insight can aid managers gauge or anticipate the potential for non-compliance in participatory approaches that can impact the health of marine ecosystems.

Blue foods, sourced in aquatic environments, are important for the economies, livelihoods, nutritional security and cultures of people in many nations. They are often nutrient rich1, generate lower emissions and impacts on land and water than many terrestrial meats2, and contribute to the health3, wellbeing and livelihoods of many rural communities4. The Blue Food Assessment recently evaluated nutritional, environmental, economic and justice dimensions of blue foods globally. Here we integrate these findings and translate them into four policy objectives to help realize the contributions that blue foods can make to national food systems around the world: ensuring supplies of critical nutrients, providing healthy alternatives to terrestrial meat, reducing dietary environmental footprints and safeguarding blue food contributions to nutrition, just economies and livelihoods under a changing climate. To account for how context-specific environmental, socio-economic and cultural aspects affect this contribution, we assess the relevance of each policy objective for individual countries, and examine associated co-benefits and trade-offs at national and international scales. We find that in many African and South American nations, facilitating consumption of culturally relevant blue food, especially among nutritionally vulnerable population segments, could address vitamin B12 and omega-3 deficiencies. Meanwhile, in many global North nations, cardiovascular disease rates and large greenhouse gas footprints from ruminant meat intake could be lowered through moderate consumption of seafood with low environmental impact. The analytical framework we provide also identifies countries with high future risk, for whom climate adaptation of blue food systems will be particularly important. Overall the framework helps decision makers to assess the blue food policy objectives most relevant to their geographies, and to compare and contrast the benefits and trade-offs associated with pursuing these objectives.

The role of common pool natural resources (CPRs) such as forests, grasslands, rivers, lakes, wetlands and oceans in rural economies has been much debated in the literature, often on the basis of micro-level and context-specific analyses focusing on a single CPR in a single location. This paper draws on data from nine low and medium-income countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America to estimate the contribution of CPR-based income to poverty and inequality, and to explore how CPR-based income is associated with household assets, the abundance of CPRs, and institutions of resource access.Our analysis confirms that CPR income contributes significantly to the income of the rural poor. Households below the World Bank $1.9 poverty line derive on average one fourth of their household income from CPR. Therefore, there is a potential synergy between SDGs 14 (conserving life below water) and 15 (conserving life on land), and SDG 1 (poverty reduction). Elite households, however, generally benefit more from CPRs, not because of differential access to the resource but because of their differential access to complementary productive assets, financial capital, social networks and markets. Hence, CPRs reduce inequality only when resource extraction is done for subsistence purposes using labour-intensive methods.

Expansion of aquaculture in the Sundarbans Biosphere Reserve (SBR) is irreversibly replacing agricultural land and the drivers of this change are disputed. Based on in-depth interviews with 67 aquaculture farmers, this paper characterizes major aquaculture types in the SBR, their impacts, and identifies drivers of conversion from agricultural land. Aquaculture types included traditional, improved-traditional, modified-extensive, and semi-intensive systems. Extensive capture of wild shrimp larvae is environmentally harmful but constitutes an important livelihood. Semi-intensive aquaculture of exotic shrimp (Litopenaeus vannamei) has much higher unit-area profitability than other types but involves greater financial risk. Profitability is the main driver for the transition from agriculture, but environmental factors such as lowered crop yields and cyclone impacts also contributed. Many conversions from agriculture to aquaculture are illegal according to the stakeholders. Existing legislation, if enforced, could halt the loss of agriculture, while the promotion of improved-traditional aquaculture could reduce the demand for wild seed.