Marine habitats sustain critical biodiversity and fish stocks that support the livelihoods of coastal communities across Honduras and the world. Healthy oceans and well managed fisheries ensure continuous benefits for those who depend on them during good times and bad.
These crises brought a heightened recognition that well-managed fish stocks and thriving ecosystems can be an effective way to secure food and income for communities and prevent further migration—a worsening phenomenon in Central America. This understanding of the ocean as a safety net has been promoted among fishers and resulted in increased recognition by the government and greater support for the declaration of new protected areas. Increased demand for protection enables actions that ensure healthy oceans and thriving coastal communities.
Effective ocean protection and fisheries management are complex endeavors that require diverse interventions and strategies. Community-driven action, however, always needs to be a core component. Having communities as stewards of their marine resources, fishing responsibly, and participating in management and surveillance, is essential for effective conservation and management.
Access to savings and affordable credit through Saving Clubs
Saving clubs provide economic safety nets against crises and shocks by serving as mechanisms for families to save and borrow in the absence of formal financial services. During COVID-19 and after the hurricanes, saving clubs provided an immediate safety net for many families.
Savings clubs are the most successful in communities or sectors where informality and reliance on cash and predatory loans is high, that is where financial services are non-existent or tough to access.
Access to savings and credit serve as safety nets not during extreme events like pandemics or disasters, but during bad fishing seasons too where catches and income are low. Furthermore, savings clubs not only provide safety nets but can also serve as mechanisms to invest. Many savings clubs in Honduras have started to invest their savings in productive assets or entrepreneurial endeavors, making their funds grow faster.
Fish Forever’s overarching community-driven approach and concrete elements within it, like savings clubs, have strengthened bonds between community members and built social capital across fishing communities. Stronger social cohesion and greater social capital—through shared savings and joint participation in natural resource management— proved essential in times of crises and resulted in families and communities supporting each other with food and other essentials.
A community-driven approach that places people at the center of the solution is essential. Savings clubs (SC) build community cohesion, increase trust & improve communication and coordination. Members come together to save weekly, making it a shared, transparent process. In addition to a savings fund, SC also includes a social fund that can be used for emergencies or community projects, serving as shared capital in times of need.
Promoting social cohesion takes time and requires continuous engagement with local communities to earn their trust and improve communications. Savings clubs can help fast-track this process. It is critical to follow saving clubs methodology but provide groups with some flexibility to make it their own. Having clubs set their own rules is also essential for building trust.
Access to savings and affordable credit through Saving Clubs
A healthy ocean
Fostering relationships across disciplines and across the community
The University of Wollongong (UOW) Blue Economy projects recognized that building a community based approach requires an investment in relationships. This means that we expended considerable resources in building networks, fostering relationships and giving those relationships time to mature and evolve. This occurred internally, as we got to know the different disciplinary areas that different team members represented within the project. It also involved building collaborations with external partners over time. The most significant demonstration of this the growing role of Aboriginal partners in the research. Aboriginal partners and co-investigators had input into the early stages of the project and over time this relationship grew and evolved to the point that today our partners, the Illawarra Local Aboriginal Land Council, are co-leaders in the project and are co-developing future collaborations with UOW.
Time
Regular engagement
Active listening
Open minds
Investing time and energy into building relationships is difficult to build into traditional academic and institutional practices. It is important for the relationship to be based on the principles of reciprocity, so that all partners benefit from the exchange of knowledge and information.
The storymap interface, centred on a pin of an indigenous fishing enterprise in Moruya, NSW
UoW
An example image from the storymap: Cruise tourism
Open source
An example image from the storymap: 3D seawalls
Open source
Before embarking on a journey to build a community based approach to a Blue Economy we felt it was important to first understand where we had come from and where we are now. We examined the historical role of maritime businesses on the NSW South Coast and the existing economic, social and cultural relationships of South Coast communities with the ocean. The result was a Blue Futures ‘Story map’ which details the diverse ways in which businesses, community groups and individuals engage with the ocean in our region.
When ‘taking stock’ of a region’s blue economy potential, the story map design ensured that no one social, environmental or economic angle was prioritized over another. Instead, space became the organizing principle, enabling users to scroll around the map to learn about what was important to the blue economy around them. In practice, this meant that employment statistics, historic coastal artworks and ocean governance examples appeared alongside clean ocean tech startups and established marine industries. The map brings these data into conversation with each other in the mind of the viewer, purely by their spatial proximity. This is an important first step in raising the profile of cultural and social data for developing blue economy solutions, which are often overlooked in favour of quantifiable statistics.
This building block was enabled by a multidisciplinary team committed to working across traditional disciplinary silos. Artists worked with geographers, economists and environmental scientists to gather together a breadth of visual and textual materials for inclusion in the story map.
We underestimated how long the storymapping process would take. Substantial time was needed to bring together digital resources, rights for image use (both from companies, artists and museums/archives) and for trialing different story map styles to best suit the project scale and range of sources.
Collating diverse data sources together in a publically accessible and easy to navigate story map gave this building block a larger audience both locally and globally than a traditional written report or textual media release. The story map educated diverse audiences about the ‘blue economy’ and ‘blue future’ concepts which would be viewed by many as otherwise amorphous or niche ideas, at a distance from their everyday lives.
