SUBSTANCE AND DEPTH IN FISHERIES MANAGEMENT: ENGAGING HAWAIʻI SMALL BOAT FISHERS TO MITIGATE PELAGIC SHARK MORTALITY A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAIʻI AT MĀNOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF SCIENCE IN NATURAL RESOURCES AND ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT MAY 2019 By Mia A. Iwane Thesis Committee: Kirsten L. L. Oleson, Chairperson Mehana Vaughan Kirsten Leong Keywords: West Hawaiʻi, fisheries management, shark conservation, conflict, problem definition, power Acknowledgements I thank the insightful women of my thesis committee, Drs. Kirsten Oleson, Kirsten Leong, and Mehana Vaughan, for their expertise and professional guidance on this journey toward and beyond my Master’s thesis. I am also grateful for my fellow members of the Oleson Lab, who lent their support and feedback on many presentations to share this work with diverse audiences. I am very grateful to my research participants, who welcomed me into their community, their homes, and their boats. Generously, they shared their patience, trust, and stories with me, becoming valued teachers to this student. It has been an honor of mine to work with them and to share their perspectives with others. Thank you to Dr. Melanie Hutchinson, Mark Royer, and other members of the Shark Tagger team, for allowing me to observe and participate in their work. And, for being important advocates for this work in circles it would not have otherwise reached. You have given me a voice I did not realize I had. I thank the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center and the Joint Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research for supporting my graduate assistantship over the past two years. For funding this research, I thank the NOAA Cooperative Research and Bycatch Reduction Engineering Programs. Even before this research began, countless mentors from the fishing, research, academic, and management communities played critical roles in shaping my passion for this work and helping me to navigate it more gracefully. I thank them, and hope they know what they gave to me. Finally, I thank my family and friends, who offer their endless support in every way I could hope for. Without them, I would not be where I am today. ii Abstract Fisheries management problems are complex, yet simplified, technical problem definitions often inhibit the management regimes that seek to identify and resolve them. This leads to management solutions that fail to address underlying conflicts and exacerbate social and political inequities. I explore opportunities to engage fishers to address these failures. This work finds footing in a case study of interactions between small boat fishers and pelagic sharks. Semi-structured interviews and a community-based shark-tagging project with small boat fishers on Hawaiʻi Island illuminate fishers’ relationships with one another, fisheries managers and scientists, and the sharks they encounter. Using a theoretical framework that mobilizes theories of conflict and problem definition, I find that the shark-fisher interaction problem is layered. It is shaped both by substantive factors, like shark behavior and economic context, and deeper-level problems, including degraded fisher-manager and fisher-researcher relationships, threats to fisher identity, and poor fisher perceptions of management legitimacy. Thus, endeavors to mitigate shark mortality require an equally multi-depth solution with substantive, process-, and relationships-based approaches. Such a multi-depth solution might include collaborative research for alternatives to lethal shark-handling practices, wherein fishers and scientists reconcile dissonant values and problem definitions and exchange and co-produce knowledge in pursuit of a transparent goal; and scientists communicate early and often with fishers both directly and using the fishing community’s existing social structures. These lessons and the framework used to incite them have applications wherever diverse actors seek solutions to complex, layered problems with variable definitions, in natural resource management and beyond. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgements .................................................................................................. ii Abstract ..................................................................................................................... iii Table of Contents ..................................................................................................... iv List of Tables ............................................................................................................ vi List of Figures ......................................................................................................... vii Chapter 1 .................................................................................................................... 1 Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 1 Theoretical Framework ...................................................................................................... 3 Levels of Conflict ............................................................................................................... 4 Conflict Intervention Triangle ............................................................................................ 4 Applying conflict theory: Problem definition and Solution development ............................ 5 Problem and Site Selection ............................................................................................... 6 Research Objectives and Questions ................................................................................ 7 Methods .............................................................................................................................. 8 Human Subjects Review ................................................................................................... 8 Data Collection .................................................................................................................. 8 Data Analysis .................................................................................................................... 9 Chapter 2 .................................................................................................................. 11 Research Participants ..................................................................................................... 11 Fishing in Kona ................................................................................................................ 12 Fishing practices ............................................................................................................. 12 Culture ............................................................................................................................ 13 Evolution through time: Participation, Technology, and Fish Abundance ....................... 14 Visibility ........................................................................................................................... 15 Competition and Cooperation ......................................................................................... 16 Economic Context ............................................................................................................ 17 Demand .......................................................................................................................... 17 Market competition .......................................................................................................... 18 Increasing costs .............................................................................................................. 19 Participation .................................................................................................................... 20 What does it mean to be a fisher? .................................................................................. 20 Personality traits ............................................................................................................. 20 iv Why fish? ........................................................................................................................ 22 Threats to human well-being ........................................................................................... 22 Information sharing ......................................................................................................... 24 Information types and sources ........................................................................................ 24 In or out ........................................................................................................................... 26 Guarding info .................................................................................................................. 30 Sharks ............................................................................................................................... 31 Species ........................................................................................................................... 31 Interaction frequency ...................................................................................................... 31 Decision-making ............................................................................................................. 39 What is a shark?