In a declaration made on August 2022, the Chilean President Gabriel Boric Font gave “extreme urgency” to the bill, that was initially presented on January 19, 2016, that declares the nullity of the current Fisheries Law, which was delegitimized due to the court’s conviction, after 9 years since, a former senator and a former Member of Parliament for receiving bribes from a major fishing company (El Mostrador, 2022a) during the development of the law. The government also announced that a Bill for a New Fisheries Law will be presented between April and May 2023. This process should start in September 22 with debates in a pre-legislative work (El Mostrador, 2022b). All these processes are very relevant for ocean conservation and fisheries sustainability as Chile is one of the leading producers and exporters of marine resources in the world (FAO, 2022). In 2019, fisheries sector landings amounted to 2 million tons, 49 percent of which were caught by the artisanal sector (SERNAPESCA, 2019). Anchoveta, Jack mackerel, Araucanian herring, Chub mackerel, Jumbo flying squid, and Chilean hake are among the most important resources in terms of catch volume (SUBPESCA, 2020a).

In recent years, Chile has implemented significant fisheries regulation and management reforms, including updating its fisheries legislation with the implementation of a polycentric governance model (Gelcich, 2014) that incorporates co-management mechanisms covering the most important fisheries through Management Committees ¹ (MC) and Technical Scientific Committees and the subsequent modernization law (N° 21.132, 2019) of the governmental fisheries control agency SERNAPESCA (National Fisheries and Aquaculture Service). By 2019 Chile took a step forward in terms of transparency by uploading satellite vessel information to the Global Fishing Watch platform ² , and has considerably increased the surveillance efforts at the landing sites. These and other developments allowed some industrial fisheries, such as Southern hake and Jack mackerel, to obtain MSC certification ³ . The 2020 accountability paper of the Undersecretariat for Fisheries and Aquaculture (SUBPESCA as per its acronym in Spanish) reported improvements in the stock health of Anchoveta fisheries (from Valparaíso to Los Lagos), Jack mackerel (from Arica and Parinacota to Los Lagos), Chilean seabass (from Arica and Parinacota to -47° SL) and Chilean seabass (47°-57° SL) (SUBPESCA, 2021). Despite this, the SUBPESCA, 2021 report shows that, out of the 27 national fisheries managed with biological reference points, 1 was underexploited, 12 were fully exploited, 8 were overexploited, and 6 were depleted or collapsed. These findings indicate that, Chilean fisheries still face important sustainability challenges.

This document presents an analysis of the results of a 2020 survey to key stakeholders to identify policy improvement priorities related to the fisheries sector. The aim of the survey was to understand the stakeholders’ points of view, to contribute to the improvement processes in public policy, governance, and fisheries management by identifying priorities and solutions. After what can be considered a political impasse in Chilean politics since the so called “social explosion” in October 2019 and the follow-on constitutional process coupled with the COVID pandemic, we consider the results of this 2020 study are still relevant for the institutional process going forward as the policy focus harks back to legal reform affecting fisheries governance.

This study builds upon a consultation process carried out with key fisheries stakeholders of Chile, specifically focused on gathering their opinion on public policy improvement priorities to advance sustainability in Chilean fisheries. The study also aimed to identify the main issues along with the main possible improvement measures for the different prioritized topic. Data gathering was carried out in three stages.

During the first stage, a literature review was conducted in 2019 to identify recurrent topics pointed to in the literature as policy improvement areas for fisheries management in Chile. A total of 16 topics were identified in peer-reviewed journals, gray literature and journalistic reports written by fisheries specialists. The topics identified were (1) Illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing; (2) Integration of an economic and social perspective in fisheries research and management; (3) Update of the Artisanal fisheries registry (RPA); (4) Development of a priority national research agenda to improve fisheries management in Chile; (5) Legitimacy of the current fisheries law; (6) Participative assessment of the fisheries management systems effectiveness; (7) Development of a new national fisheries policy; (8) Use of fishing gear which damages coastal habitats within the first five marine miles; (9) Consumption of seafood from Chile in order to guarantee food security in the country; (10) Incentives to the participation of professionals in the scientific technical committees (CCT), (11) Economic resources for the operation of management committees; (12) Transfer of tradable fishing licenses among sectors; (13) Creation of the Ministry of Fisheries and Aquaculture; (14) Representativeness of women in the consultation and management decision making bodies; (15) Indigenous people’s rights on fishing resources; and (16) Structure of the Fisheries Promotion Institute’s governing board (IFOP) ( Table 1 ).

In a subsequent stage, an online survey ⁴ ( Supplementary Material 1 ) was carried out comprising of open-ended and closed-ended questions divided into three sections. The first section sought to collect general information. The second section was composed by closed-ended questions and allowed each informant to determine the relevance of each of the 16 previously identified topics using the Likert scale (from “not relevant” to “very relevant”) and also included a space to propose additional topics. Finally, the third section required each respondent to choose the most urgent topic, as well as the second and third most urgent topics. Respondents were also asked to explain the issues derived from each topic and to propose specific actions to solve them.

The online survey was distributed to the largest possible number of fishery experts and stakeholders through a snowball sampling strategy. A total of 152 responses were collected from key informants from the artisanal sector, academia, government officials, industrial sector professionals, Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and non-governmental organizations (NGO)s. The responses were collected between February 4 and April 7, 2020.

The third stage of the study focused on analyzing the content of the surveys. The respondents were classified by sector and by years of experience ( Figure 1 ), as well as by gender ( Figure 2 ). The relevance given by respondents to each topic was quantified. The relevance level of each topic was considered as the weighted average of the answers given by each respondent. Each respondent had the opportunity to rate each topic by assigning a score. The topics considered “not relevant” were given a “0” score, topics “slightly relevant” scored “1”, “regular” topics scored “2”, “relevant” topics scored “3” and topics considered “very relevant” were given the score of “4”. The topics with a weighted average between 4.00 and 3.01 were considered “very relevant”, those scoring between 3.00 and 2.01 were considered “relevant”, scores between 2.00 and 1.01 were considered “regular” and those between 1.00 and 0.01 were considered “slightly relevant”.

Further to the above, the level of urgency to address to the topics was quantified, assigning a score of three to the most urgent topics, and a score of two and one to the second and third most urgent topics respectively. In this way, the study defined the priority topics that, according to the respondents, are the most urgent to be addressed. Finally, using the information provided by the respondents on the issues and possible solutions, the study described the five most urgent topics to be addressed in order to improve fisheries management in Chile.

“Illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing” was by far the most urgent issue to be addressed, scoring 120 points ( Table 2 ; Figure 3 ). This was followed in second and third places by “developing a priority national research agenda to improve fisheries management in Chile” and “legitimacy of the current fisheries law,” scoring 71 and 69 points, respectively. Ranked in fourth and fifth places, with 63 and 62 points, respectively, were “developing a new national fisheries policy” and “updating the Artisanal Fisheries Registry (RPA by its acronym in Spanish)”. Further to the 16 improvement areas initially identified in the first stage (literature review) and scored for relevance and urgency by all 152 respondents, two new improvement areas were identified by 27 respondents, mainly from the NGO sector. Specifically, the development of an ecosystem approach and climate change adaptation within the fisheries ⁵ . Yet, the analysis below focuses only on the five top priority improvements areas for policy reform. For details on the distribution of priority improvement areas per respondent’s sector see Figure 4 .

This section summarizes the five main actionable policy recommendations in ranking order to improve fisheries governance and to address sustainability challenges in Chilean fisheries:

The 2020 survey to key informants involved in the fishery served to identify some of the priority policy areas that stakeholders from different sectors within the sector considered as priority. Yet, it also served to highlight the areas where more awareness is needed, such as social, gender and equity issues. The profiles of the informants, which for example did not include specific groups (e.g., indigenous peoples) as respondents, have probably impacted the focus on some relevant issues, such as the tenure rights of indigenous communities. The effect of this methodological gap has been probably exacerbated by the discrimination that Indigenous peoples suffer in Chile, not only when it comes to fisheries related issues (Hiriart-Bertrand et al., 2020), but in other areas of life (see e.g., Merino et al., 2009; de Cea et al., 2016).

Since the development of the survey in 2019-2020, a number of papers have reinforced the relevance of IUU fishing in Chile (Oyanedel, 2019), analyzing the specific motivations for non-compliance with specific rules (such as the quota) (Oyanedel et al., 2020), the essential role of traders in shaping illegality in market trends (Oyanedel et al., 2021) and the required multidimensional interventions that are required to resolve the wicked challenges of illegal trade in the Chilean artisanal hake fishery (Oyanedel et al., 2022). Building upon analysis of 20 Chilean fisheries, Donlan et al. (2020) estimated that illegal landings account for as much as 70% of the national landings and propose a methodology that, building upon enforcement officers’ knowledge, enables effective institutionalization of illegal fishing estimates. All this recent evidence (see as well RPS Submitter et al., 2022) points that the issue of illegal fishing remains largely unresolved, and that the development of a new legal framework can contribute to address, at least partially. New policy developments in this field will largely benefit from the extensive advances in knowledge on the topic in Chile resulting from the increased interest by a number of researchers.

Since the completion of the online survey in 2020, some advances have been made in regards the update of the Artisanal Fisheries Registry. The Chilean government opened the RPA to crew members in some specific fisheries as jumbo flying squid, stone crab among other fisheries (SUBPESCA, 2020b). By June 2022 the Chilean government initiated an agenda with 20 actions to support the artisanal fishing sector; amongst them the issuance of a bill aimed at improving the system of deadlines to regularize the registration in the RPA in the event of the death of the vessel owner. Additionally, the government rolled out a system for replacing vacancies generated by fishers that have passed away or have retired in fisheries without risk of overexploitation or whose status allows it (Ministerio de Economía, Fomento y Turismo, 2022). Effectively addressing the shortages of an outdated RPA is a crucial issue for the governance of small-scale fisheries as it has direct ramifications for tenure rights and IUU fishing, but also to the entire co-management system because, as pointed out by Tapia-Jopia (2022), the lack of a complete RPA prevents equitable access to representation within the Management Committees. Álvarez Burgos (2020) points as well to the ramifications that an incomplete RPA have in terms of gender equity, as women working in the sector who are not directly involved in the fishing itself cannot register in the RPA, leaving them as informal workers, without social protection and with less tools to participate in productive development funds. Some improvements have been incorporated in August 2021 in order to promote gender equity in the fisheries and aquaculture sector (Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional de Chile, 2021). Amongst other issues, the policy ensures that women’s representation in any participatory platform of the fishers’ governance system (such as the Management Committees and the Technical Scientific Committees) is at a minimum of one third of the total elected members (with a maximum of two thirds). It is still soon to evaluate the implementation of these recent policy improvements.

Upon recent years, challenges have also been raised regarding communications flows, mainly downward and upward, between fishers and Management committees’ representatives. Regarding downward communications, Reyes et al., 2017 recommends disposing an operating protocol for Management Committees that includes a communication and dissemination plan, since it is essential to inform the management measures included in the management plans to local users. Nevertheless, little is still known about upwards communications, namely the way fishers communicate their concerns to Management Committees representatives. In this sense, progress needs to be done in the design of fisheries management models that consider local information and traditional knowledge. This issue becomes more relevant when we analyze data-poor populations. According to Reyes et al. (2017), participation could be improved if Management Committees establishes periods for groups of people and/or institutions to present their concerns, suggestions, studies, background regarding to managements plans.

The current government has taken steps to address one of the main policy improvements identified in the 2020 survey, the lack of legitimacy of the fisheries law. The development of a new legal framework should focus on addressing the root causes that triggered the lack of legitimacy the previous legal framework (tenure rights for the artisanal sector), strike a balance with the positive elements of the old fisheries legal framework (as pointed out by the 2020 survey informants, mainly linked to co-management and the polycentric approach) and include the few but important policy improvements that were introduced since 2020. Achieving this balance will benefit from extensive consultation and stakeholder participation, as was pointed out by survey respondents.

RG-W and RV: conceptualization, methodology, data curation, data analysis, formal analysis, writing – original draft, writing – review and editing, visualization. GO, GA, LH-B and RL-C: writing – review and editing. EA-P: conceptualization, methodology, writing – original draft, writing – review and editing. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.