Sisir Pradhan, Prateep Nayak, and Derek Armitage advocate a conceptual departure from a neoclassical economic orientation of dried fish value chains to an emphasis on linked social-ecological systems (SES) perspective, defined as an integrated, coupled, interdependent and co-evolutionary system with mutual vertical and horizontal feedbacks between ecological and social subsystems (Berkes et al., 2003).
You can download their Open Access article here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666049022000068.
Key messages
- The conventional dried fish value chain follows a narrow neoclassical economic perspective.
- It fails to factor in non-capital relations of dried fish shaped by specific histories, ecologies, people, and practices.
- SES-oriented dried fish value chain (SESVC) reconceptualizes the dried fish value chain by considering fisheries resource system as a critical new node.
- SESVC puts Primacy on integration of human and environmental dimensions and social well-being of upstream value chain actors.
Conceptualization of SESVC
The figure above (fig. 5 in the published article) provides an initial hybrid and interdisciplinary conceptual framing of a SES-oriented dried fish value chain (SESVC). The framework includes several novel ideas in terms of its main components and cross-scale interactions.
First, the framework introduces the resource base or the fisheries ecosystem as a central and/or novel node in the dried fish value chain. This positioning comes at the cost of excluding the fish and the fishers. The principle that ‘if there is no fish (and its habitat) there is no dried fish’ will become a reality if we continue to exclude the resource and ecosystem node from the value chain . The resource node is fundamentally dynamic and that determines the price, product, livelihoods of resource dependent communities and the regulating framework which are critical to the functioning of the value chain.
Second, the SES value chain perspective places the producing and processing, trading, retailing, and consumer nodes from the conventional value chain along with the new resource and ecosystem node in a two-way feedback relationship. Doing so clarifies that these nodes are bound by multiple interactions across several scales and levels of the entire value chain – that they are in fact ‘co-produced’.
Third, the framework reflects a social-ecological system view of the dried fish value chain by organizing nonlinear feedback, dynamic linkages, uncertainties, and emergence as key attributes that guide the node level interactions.
Fourth, the three segments – structure, conduct and performance – of the value chain remain integral to its core and an active part of the interactive process involving the SES attributes and the five nodes
Abstract
Small-scale fisheries (SSF) support over 90% of the 120 million people engaged in fisheries globally. Dried fish is an important sub-sector of SSF, which is characterized by declining social, economic, political conditions of people involved in its production, and the ecosystems they depend on. Dried fish accounts for 12% of the total fish consumption globally but can increase up to 36% in low-income countries. About half of the people involved in dried fish production and marketing are women. The approach taken to analyse dried fish sector has so far followed a narrow subset of commodity chain approaches with a focus on financial value, transmitted in a linear ‘vertical’ fashion across value chain actors. Existing value chain approach fails to factor the non-capital relationships of dried fish that are contingent upon specific histories, ecologies, peoples, places, and the practices. The narrow neoclassical economic perspective of dried fish value chain (DFVC) also impedes appropriate responses to their unique attributes pertaining to social, ecological, institutional interactions across multiple scales. Failure to consider social-ecological system (SES) attributes, its connections and relationships with dried fish value chain not only undermine social wellbeing of upstream actors but also perpetuates social-environmental inequity and injustice. The paper offers a novel SES-oriented DFVC perspective that focuses on social wellbeing of fishers and dried fish workers. The reconceptualisation of structure, conduct and performance of DFVC is done by conducting an interdisciplinary analysis of peer-reviewed literature from SES, value chain and social wellbeing.
Citation
Pradhan, Sisir Kanta, Prateep Kumar Nayak, and Derek Armitage. 2022. “A Social-Ecological Systems Perspective on Dried Fish Value Chains.” Current Research in Environmental Sustainability 4 (January): 100128. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.crsust.2022.100128.