Why ‘stewards’ not always live up to their reputation – Development, fishing practices and knowledge within Swedish Baltic fisheries This project deals with the concept of stewardship, which may be explained as practices that foster a sustainable use of natural resources. I am especially interested in the link between resource users’ knowledge and their stewardship, and how stewardship, or lack of stewardship, can be explained by changing social and ecological conditions.

In the project I ask if and how fishers’ local ecological knowledge can be used as a source for sustainable use of marine resources as well as why some fishers destroy the resource they depend upon while others don’t. Swedish Baltic fisheries is used as a case study because here the number of fishers, and thus also their fishing practices and knowledge they embody, are disappearing quickly. It is important to understand what this loss of practices and knowledge means in more concrete terms for the possibilities to develop fisheries towards more sustainability.

För mer information:
Emma Björkvik, Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholms universitet