Henry Bartelet
Henry is a Senior Research Associate in the School of Life and Environmental Sciences, where he works as a Social-Ecological Systems Modeler under the supervision of Associate Professor Michele Barnes. Henry's research is focused on interdisciplinary, longitudinal social-ecological network research investigating tradeoffs and co-benefits in sustainability processes and interventions in coastal fishing communities along the Kenyan coast.
Session
How people respond to environmental decline can reduce pressure on ecosystems or intensify it. We examine factors leading some fishers to respond to declining reef fish abundance by fishing harder, focusing on how they perceive the cause of decline and how they are connected to other fishers and marine resources. We do so by drawing on comprehensive structured survey and network data from 656 reef fishers across five co-managed coastal communities in Kenya. Among fishers who perceived declining abundance, we distinguished between endogenous causes arising within the fishery, such as overfishing and illegal gears, and exogenous causes originating outside it or beyond local control, such as pollution and climate change. Most fishers (571/656) perceived a decline in reef fish abundance between 2015 and 2019, and nearly half of those (282/571) reported fishing harder in response – amplifying the declining reef fish abundance. Fishers who attributed resource declines to endogenous causes were more likely to fish harder than those who attributed it to exogenous causes, contrary to expectations that recognizing local causes should encourage restraint. Social relationships among fishers were unrelated to perceptions of, and responses to, decline, yet the overlap between social relationships and resource dependence mattered. Specifically, fishers connected to others targeting the same resources were less likely overall to attribute decline to local causes but were more likely to do so when those connected fishers shared that interpretation. These shared-resource relationships, and dependence on multiple ecologically connected resources, were also associated with fishing harder. Our findings show that relationships among people and resources can shape both how environmental change is understood and how people respond. Structures that could support coordination may also intensify competition when confidence in community-wide restraint is limited, creating feedbacks that further threaten fisheries sustainability.