Increasing the adaptive capacity of local community fishing businesses
CONANP is encouraging lobster fishermen to diversify into providing sport-fishing opportunities for local tourists, rather than relying on just selling lobsters to local and regional hotel. This makes the most of a competitive advantage in the sports-fishing industry: sports fishermen are attracted to the region by the diversity of species, desiring the challenge of catching a range of such varieties, rather than one big one.
CONANP is supporting this diversification in the following ways:
Supporting the expansion of local fishing cooperatives into tourist service operators aware of the importance of the maintenance of local ecosystems and in following CONANP regulations;
Providing capacity development to these cooperatives in the area of touristic business development and administration
Mediating between cooperatives and resolving conflicts through regulation and norm setting (for example, in the quantity of launches that can take tourists out, per day)
To have or build consensus and commitment within and between communities about the type of touristic services offered.
Build upon existing structures (such as fishing cooperatives) of social cohesion, leadership and organization to support negotiations and problem solving, as well as enabling communication and interaction between actors;
Availability of scientific evidence to design norms for the sustainable implementation of new touristic activities.
It is very useful and relevant to have reliable scientific studies, and solidly-researched business models, to support local training and design of new touristic business opportunities;
Local people tend to be apprehensive about the risk of losing short-term sources of income; therefore they tend to resist any change in their productive activities.
Before any investment in new productive activities, the communities have to be able to trust, and have solid evidences that these new activities are practicable and potentially profitable.
It is of vital importance to make use of existing social structures or organizations (i.e. cooperatives) to generate, lead and manage new productive activities;
Managerial skills and knowledge might be limited in marginalized and rural communities. Therefore, it is essential to support capacity development in this area. For example, how to sell their services, as well as how to account for and manage successful businesses.