TBTI GLOBAL
How this book came to be
It was during the ‘Town Hall’ event at the One Ocean Science Congress, held in Nice in June 2025, in conjunction with the Third United Nations Ocean Conference, that I mentioned the need for ‘governance literacy’. My invitation to join the panel came from Brice Trouillet, Nantes University, who co-organized the event with his colleagues for the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS).
By Ratana Chuenpagdee
TBTI Global
Focusing on ocean and maritime governance, the session aimed to reflect on the meaning and the practices of governance, and how it has shaped decisions and transformation of our activities at sea. We were also asked to share our perspective on the main obstacles to governance and the role of research. I don’t remember exactly how it came about but someone must have mentioned ‘ocean literacy’. I didn’t have any objection to it but felt that the kind of literacy that is very much needed nowadays is about governance. The desire to contribute to improving governance, and governance literacy, has underlined our work on Interactive Governance (IG), which has led to several publications.
The ‘Governance Literacy’ book project began with an open call for contribution, and an ‘in-person’ workshop with the lead authors of the accepted chapters in St. John’s, NL in May 2024. The workshop reminded us of the numerous meetings we had when we were working on the first IG book, ‘Fish for Life.’ We spent a lot of time then deliberating on the different aspects of the IG theory, debating on some of the concepts, and negotiating what we wrote.
The workshop in St. John’s had the same flavour, with the new and the old learners of the IG working together on building the book content and structuring it.
The book benefited from the richness of our conversation and the great discussion we had there, and some of the reflections and the forward thinking for IG are presented in the volume.
The book was timed to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the “Fish for Life” book. A lot has happened in the past two decades in the theory and the practice of fisheries, coastal and ocean governance, as seen in a growing list of literature and the widespread uptake of the concept in policy circles and on the ground. Governance is no longer an alien term, but its literacy remains to be seen.
We had a soft launch of the book at the 5th World SSF Congress held in April 2026 in Hua Hin, Thailand, with several authors presenting their chapters.
We look forward to talking more about the book when opportunities arise, including at the TBTI Webinar in November for World Fisheries Day.
This book is the seventh in the row that TBTI has realized on interactive governance applied to small-scale fisheries. Our work started with the 2005 book “Fish for Life” on Amsterdam University Press. Both Ratana and I were part of this initial publication and in all later works. For us, TBTI was an opportunity to follow it up by further exploring its theoretical roots and dimensions. The number of publications suggest that this is still a work in progress. With the “Governance Literacy” book, I personally do not think there is much need now to explain the basics of interactive governance as a conceptual framework but to use it as an analytical tool for small-scale fisheries research, also for the implementation of the SSF Guidelines, and beyond.
Svein Jentoft
TBTI Global
Ratana Chuenpagdee and Svein Jentoft provide us with another thought-provoking book that blends developments of the interactive governance concept with rich empirical underpinning from studies of small-scale fisheries across the globe. As largely unselective industrial production models continue their subsidy-driven destruction of marine ecosystems, low impact, small-scale fisheries are the ‘Sleeping Beauty’ of biodiversity regeneration and just stewardship. The panorama of the diversity of the case studies lets the reader look through the keyhole of future opportunities.
Cornelia E Nauen
initiator of the Small-Scale Fisheries Academy
This book aims to improve the ‘governance literacy’ of the actors involved in governing fisheries. This forward-looking edited volume distils over 20 years of work by the editors to develop a comprehensive theory and language of ‘interactive governance’. It also draws in new authors from around the world to show how theory and practice co-evolve. It is a must-read for anyone interacting with fisheries and the diverse cast of actors involved in governing them.
Eddie H. Allison
Principal Scientist, WorldFish-Penang
About the book
This book is premised on the great expectation about small-scale fisheries globally as a means of providing food security and alleviating poverty among the millions of people in coastal and inland communities. To reach these goals, small-scale fisheries must be governed in a way that is efficient, effective and socially just. The reality, however, as this book shows, is that governance systems are not always up to the task. Small-scale fisheries are not given the attention they deserve by governments, they are vulnerable to external pressures, and they often find themselves at the losing side in the competition with other goals like conservation, and for access to markets, resources, and space, making the life in small-scale fisheries an uphill struggle for sustainability and survival. The book, which draws on case studies from around the world, provides a sharp analysis of the key elements, the design and the functioning of the governance systems as they relate to small-scale fisheries. A unifying analytic approach is “interactive governance theory”, which has its own language that can help improve governance, and governance literacy, for fisheries and ocean sustainability. The theory has also been explored and applied in other TBTI publications in the Mare Series.
About the editors
Ratana Chuenpagdee
Ratana Chuenpagdee is a University Researcher Professor at Memorial University in St. John's, Canada. She leads the global partnership for small-scale fisheries, Too Big To Ignore (TBTI), which aims to elevate the profile of small-scale fisheries and rectify their marginalization in national and international policies. Some of the current activities are 'Blue Justice' for small-scale fisheries, transdisciplinary capacity training to support the implementation of the SSF Guidelines, and innovative fisheries governance.
Svein Jentoft
Svein Jentoft is Professor Emeritus at the Norwegian College of Fishery Science, UiT - The Arctic University of Norway. His long career as a social scientist, specializing on fisheries management and fisheries communities, has yielded numerous articles and books. He has been involved in, and led, many international projects in both the Global South and North. Jentoft is a founding member of TBTI and has been leading a working group on ʻGoverning the Governanceʼ and a research cluster related to the ʻSSF Guidelinesʼ. He has edited and authored several TBTI books, including the trilogy ‘Life Above Water’ (2019), ʻThe Gift of Communityʼ (2023) and ‘Reading Small-Scale Fisheries’ (2025).