FAO Expert Workshop on  Aquaculture Co-management

Editor/Mohamed Shihab

08/06/2022

Hybrid meeting, Kigali, the Republic of Rwanda, 8–10 June 2022 

Aquaculture has seen tremendous growth over the past few decades demonstrating its crucial role in providing food, nutrition, income and livelihoods globally. Nevertheless, increasing population, climate change, production intensification and resources overexploitation are challenging governments and involved stakeholders to seek for long-term solutions to these issues, and support good governance frameworks for the sector. Collaborative and interactive co-management, particularly in small-scale farming systems at the community level, is emerging as one of the instruments that could be effectively used to this end.  

In 2020 FAO, with the support of the Ministry of the Oceans and Fisheries of the Republic of Korea and of the Korea Maritime Institute, has launched a project  (Smart Fisheries Co-management) focusing on the design and implementation of contextualized fisheries co-management systems at national and local level.  Recognizing the relevance of co-management as a mechanism for power sharing, institution building, trust and social capital enhancing, problem solving, knowledge-sharing, social learning, and for encouraging collaborative opportunities and collective action, it is now  foreseen to bring the models of co-management into the aquaculture systems.

Aquaculture co-management (ACM) is a very new concept to be explored through this workshop. If clearly defined, ACM  can offer a means of bringing together a range of existing approaches that are either already in practice or being developed. ACM is a central principle of the Ecosystem Based Approach to Aquaculture. ACM may also offer a bridge to the growing range of private sector attempts to guide beyond farm sustainability, including jurisdictional approaches that bring together producers together with buyers, financiers and states to promote regional scale sustainability improvements. By defining goals, models and practices of implementation, and monitoring and evaluation for ACM, FAO can provide guidance on the ways a collaborative aquaculture management can support future production, conservation, social equity conditions in the aquaculture sector.

An “FAO Expert Workshop on Aquaculture Co-management”, which will be held in a hybrid format from 8 to 10 June 2022 in Kigali, the Republic of Rwanda will bring together expertise in aquaculture co-management, small-scale aquaculture, medium-to-large aquaculture, aquaculture economics, socioeconomics, natural resource law, governance and planning, to discuss these topics and guide the further implementation of ACM.

During the three days event, experts will clarify the concept of aquaculture co-management, discuss the main steps to guide a successful implementation of co-management system in aquaculture, identify tools and indicators to measure its effectiveness.

The outcomes of the workshop will guide the implementation of the three-year project “Development of the Aquaculture Co-management System for Sustainable Aquaculture” funded by the Korea Maritime Institute. The project will work to produce knowledge products on aquaculture co-management, and to develop a framework for its application as an aquaculture governance instrument, with the aim of enabling aquaculture to contribute effectively to the achievement of the SDGs in the long run and move towards the Blue Transformation