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The COVID-19 pandemic's early stages severely impacted global fisheries, particularly areas heavily reliant on imported food and tourism like the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador. To contain the spread of the virus, a full lockdown was implemented. However, the collapse of the tourism industry precipitated the worst economic crisis in the history of this multiple-use marine protected area. This paper examines the impact of the pandemic's early stages on consumption patterns and seafood security in the Galapagos from consumers' perspective, drawing on online surveys conducted during the lockdown. Our findings revealed pre-existing seafood insecurity across the archipelago, further exacerbated by the pandemic on the least-populated island. Nevertheless, the seafood system displayed moderated resilience to the pandemic's socioeconomic disruptions. A variety of adaptive responses were adopted by Galapagos residents to cope with the lockdown. Consumers modified their seafood consumption habits, while fishers adapted their harvesting and marketing strategies. Such adaptive responses were shaped by the unique socioeconomic characteristics of each inhabited island and the ability of seafood suppliers to shift from a tourism- and export-oriented to a resident- and domestic-oriented market. This transition has created novel opportunities to foster a systemic transformation of the Galapagos seafood system to enhance its resilience against future crises caused by new pandemics, climate change, or other natural and anthropogenic drivers of change., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Good governance is needed to foster good management of the environment. Yet, the link between environmental governance and environmental management has received very little research attention. This paper adopts a mechanism-based framework to unpack the link between the governance and management of species at risk or endangered species in a working landscape. Using species at risk management in the South of the Divide region of southwestern Saskatchewan as a case study, we identified four governance conditions connected by five mechanisms to produce management outcomes. The governance conditions include facilitative leadership, local autonomy, trust, and incentives. The five mechanisms include institutional disruption, institutional crafting and drift, brokerage or bridging, program uptake, and alleviation of fear of harm. We discuss how using a mechanism-based approach could help us better understand the processes within the governance system that trigger particular management outcomes. For example, in this case study, dissatisfied factors disrupt the existing governance arrangements and create new ones that reflect their desire for local autonomy. Local autonomy, in turn, creates an atmosphere for local actors to form coalitions and build trust; trust enhances program uptake and the co-design and co-implementation of incentives, which then alleviates land managers' fear of harm from participating in species at risk management. Our study also suggests that top-down institutions that create room for further institutional work can become acceptable at the local level and enhance endangered species management. We conclude that a mechanism-based explanation can be useful for opening the black box connecting environmental governance and management and offering valuable recommendations to guide policy., (© 2022. The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.)

Addressing the multiple anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic factors affecting small-scale fisheries requires collaboration from diverse regions, geographical scales, and administrative levels in order to prevent a potential misfit between governance systems and the socio-ecological problems they address. While connecting actors and stakeholders is challenging, as they often hold opposing perceptions and goals, unveiling the network configurations of governance systems remains one effective way to explore collaborative alliances in light of the diverse drivers of change present in small-scale fishery systems. This study employed descriptive statistics, exponential random graph models (ERGMs), and qualitative data analysis to explore preferential attachments of new nodes to well-positioned nodes within the Galapagos small-scale fishery governance system network and the propensity of cross-sectoral reciprocity and cross-sectoral open triads formation in the network. Our findings identified significant players and network configurations that might be essential in the collaboration diffusion and robustness of the Galapagos small-scale fishery sector governance system., (© 2022. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.)

The crisis caused by COVID-19 has profoundly affected human activities around the globe, and the Galapagos Islands are no exception. The impacts on this archipelago include the impairment of tourism and the loss of linkages with the Ecuadorian mainland, which has greatly impacted the local economy. The collapse of the local economy jeopardized livelihoods and food security, given that many impacts affected the food supply chain. During the crisis, the artisanal fishers of the Galapagos showed a high capacity to adapt to the diminishing demand for fish caused by the drastic drop in tourism. We observed that fishers developed strategies and initiatives by shifting roles, from being mainly tourism-oriented providers to becoming local-household food suppliers. This new role of fishers has triggered an important shift in the perception of fishers and fisheries in Galapagos by the local community. The community shifted from perceiving fisheries as a sector opposed to conservation and in conflict with the tourism sector to perceiving fisheries as the protagonist sector, which was securing fresh, high-quality protein for the human community. This study explores the socio-economic impacts and adaptations of COVID-19 on Galapagos' artisanal fisheries based on a mixed methods approach, including the analysis of fisheries datasets, interviews, surveys, and participant observation conducted during and after the lockdown. We illustrate the adaptive mechanisms developed by the sector and explore the changes, including societal perceptions regarding small-scale fisheries in the Galapagos. The research proposes strategies to enhance the Galapagos' economic recovery based on behaviors and traits shown by fishers which are considered potential assets to build-up resilience., Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40152-022-00268-z., Competing Interests: Conflict of interestThe authors declare no competing interests., (© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2022.)