Fisheries agreements and transformative governance in the Amazon Estuary: between state rules and self-organization

Developing principles for effective state-reinforced self-governance is a key challenge for research and policy on sustainability transitions in common-pool resource systems. In the Brazilian Amazon, traditional riverine communities rely on fishing for subsistence and income but since the 1960s, commercial fishing has driven resource degradation and social conflict in Amazonian fisheries. Communities have responded with “community fisheries agreements” to govern local fisheries, and in 2002, the Brazilian government formalized state recognition for community agreements in an innovative fisheries co-management framework. With examples from diverse social-ecological contexts across the Amazon, these fisheries agreements comprise an important set of cases for testing and refining state-reinforced self-governance principles. We analyzed a fisheries agreement process that took place in 2012–2015 on Marajó Island in the Amazon Estuary involving multiple state agencies, non-governmental organizations, and community associations representing over 1500 artisanal fisher families. Through project documents and interviews in 2021 with members of the fisheries agreement’s managing committee, we traced the co-production process of the agreement and identified the agreement’s effects in the six years after its creation. We found that the fisheries agreement institutionalized changes in community norms and self-organization that have improved certain social-ecological characteristics of the fishery, but lack of monitoring, enforcement, and conflict resolution and the absence of tangible support for iterative decision making have impeded a more complete transformation. This experience with incomplete transformative governance in Marajó holds lessons for Amazonian fisheries agreements specifically and state-reinforced self-governance processes generally, highlighting social capital and the social construction of scale as central concerns for state-reinforced self-governance.