Adaptive Learning Approaches to Fisheries Enhancement

Enhanced fisheries can provide substantial benefits to the poor in developing countries, but past experiences show that benefits often fall short of expectations because advice is either non available or provided in a top-down manner without accounting for local ecological and institutional conditions and the uncertainties they create. Adaptive learning approaches, whereby external institutions can facilitate experimental learning by resource users were seen as a potential solution to this problem. The project aimed to develop adaptive learning approaches to fisheries enhancements to overcome the constraints posed by the incomplete knowledge of  local conditions, and the dynamic changes in resources and institutional arrangements that often accompany the technical intervention of enhancement. The project explored new ways of implementing and promoting enhancement, where the key role of  governments and external agents is to support learning by stakeholders through participatory experimentation.