Adaptive Fisheries Governance in Changing Coastal Regions in Japan

Japan’s fisheries sector is undergoing a major restructuring. The coastal ecological change and natural disasters such as tsunami demand that communities transform or organize resource governance anew. Under the national policy of decentralization to cope with the aging and declining population, the availability of local infrastructure, both physical and social, plays a significant role in the adaptive capacity of the community. This book presents the historical and spatial dynamics of coastal fisheries resource governance in response to different environmental changes, its socio-political context, and challenges raised by academicians. The reader will find the national trends and geographical patterns of the administrative restructuring in the communities and fisheries cooperatives from abundant maps and figures, as well as a rich description of adaptive governance in the scale of region and community by ecological-historical approaches. Comparative analysis of the communities provides a practical framework to understand a variety of local resources in Japan’s coastal regions, which will serve as a guide to the development of alternative adaptive governance in community-based small-scale fisheries in the world.

• Adaptive governance
• Small-scale fisheries
• Ecological change
• Coastal communities
• Administrative restructuring
• Resource governance

• College of Education, Yokohama National University, Yokohama, Japan

  Akiko Ikeguchi

• Department of Geography, Rissho University, Kumagaya, Japan

  Takafumi Yokoyama

• National Museum of Ethnology, Suita, Japan

  Seishiro Sakita

Akiko Ikeguchi

Akiko Ikeguchi is an associate professor in the College of Education, Yokohama National University, Japan. As a geographer she has been working in the field of society and nature, focusing on aquatic resource use and development issues. She has conducted collaborative research projects aiming to advance an interdisciplinary approach between biophysical sciences and social sciences, and she is a founding member of the Nature–Society Study Group in the Association of Japanese Geographers (AJG). She works closely with the local communities, government, and NGOs in Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and Japan and carries out field research focusing on emerging governance issues in response to global ecological changes. She is currently an editor of the Geographical Review of Japan and a board member of AJG and the Human Geographical Society of Japan (HGSJ).

Takafumi Yokoyama

Takafumi Yokoyama is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography, Faculty of Geo-Environmental Sciences of Rissho University, Japan. He is a human geographer researching coastal fishing villages in Japan and Chile. His research interests are the socio-economic impact of aquaculture on villages, local institutions of collective fishing grounds use and fishery resource management, local and global seaweed trade and aquaculture, and adaptive capacity to tsunamis in different social scales. In his research especially, he focuses on the geographical diversity and social structure of fishing villages, the livelihoods, and the social relationships of fishers. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Tsukuba awarded in 2012 and has been in his current position since 2015.

Seishiro Sakita

Seishiro Sakita is a Research Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). His academic background consists of human geography, cultural ecology, and political ecology, while his research has also been inspired by the study of the commons. He has been exploring the micro-scale diversity of small-scale fisheries, examining diversification factors, and asking how local people have been involved in fisheries management practices. He focuses especially on the roles and transitions of the local community, indigenous ecological knowledge, co-management among multiple actors, and social-ecological systems. His work is based on empirical case studies on coastal areas in Japan and Greece. He holds a Ph.D. in geography from Nagoya University. Currently, he is also a visiting researcher of the National Museum of Ethnology, Japan.

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