Between October 17 and 19, 2017, a multidisciplinary team carried out the Transdisciplinary Workshop in Puerto Libertad, Sonora, Mexico. The team included members from the Community and Biodiversity A.C. (COBI), the Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the National Polytechnic Institute (CINVESTAV [1]), College of the Southern Border (ECOSUR), PGR Consulting, and Memorial University of Newfoundland (Canada). Attendees included 11 men and one woman from the Fisheries and Aquaculture Committee of Puerto Libertad. The goal was to learn about the Transdiciplinary Approach (TA) and how it could help identify problems impacting Small-scale Fisheries, their extent, and the solutions considering different perspectives and the context of the Committee and the community.
Puerto Libertad community was selected because of the previous work of the civil society organization (CSO), Community and Biodiversity A.C. (COBI) in this community. Trust from the community members was already built, which facilitated the acceptance of outsiders and the involvement of Committee members in the workshop. It was important to identify goals that could be feasible to achieve and of interest for the members of the community (for more details about fisheries in Puerto Libertad, see Appendix VI and VII).
Out of five identified problems, participants ranked the process of obtaining fishing licenses and corruption as the most important critical. Using the TA, they further analyzed which stakeholders were involved, their perceptions, the level of severity of the problem, previous actions that have been taken to solve it, whether the problem was part of a bigger one, and how wicked [2] they were. The similarities and differences found for each problem, helped participants to figure out the steps toward the solution.
The team expects that the results of this workshop can help researchers, students, and practitioners to deal with the complexity of small-scale fisheries and address wicked problems.
All acronyms in the report are in Spanish.
