Livelihoods in transition across the Gulf of Mexico: A three case study approach

Livelihood transitions within coastal communities can result from biophysical changes to the environment that people make a living from, or from policies that affect an individual’s or community’s way of life. Using the socio-ecological framework, these transitions, and the adaptions that fishers in coastal communities have employed were analyzed for adaptive co-management potential. The hypothesis is that coastal communities that have policies that allow for adaptive co-management to occur have an increased capacity to positively adapt to a transitioning livelihood. A mixed methods convergent design was created for three case studies, where semi-structured interviews were conducted in select communities, followed by content analysis of relevant fishing policies. The Yucatan Case Study studied small-scale fishers across two coastal towns, Sisal and San Felipe. The Texas Case Study examined the Gulf shrimp fishery fleet in Palacios and Port Isabel/Port Brownsville. The last case study focused on content analysis of Cuban fishing and tourism policies. In each case study themes emerged from inductive coding of interviews that created typologies that were then paired with the findings of the content analysis, or policies from each case study. The convergence and divergence analysis were then used to produce adaptive co-management recommendations within the communities. This approach allowed a deeper synthesis and thus an understanding of the dissonance that exists when livelihood change occurs.