How fishers attribute blame for marine ecosystem degradation: developing a social relational approach to conflict in capture fisheries

Dražen Cepić, PhD, Branko Ančić, PhD and Mislav Škacan are the authors of the scientific paper How fishers attribute blame for marine ecosystem degradation: developing a social relational approach to conflict in capture fisheries. The paper is published in “Ecology and Society”, indexed in Q1 for Ecology in the Scopus database.

Abstract: Although fisheries resources are under significant pressure from various fisheries stakeholders, we explore how fishers perceive responsibility for excessive, irresponsible, or harmful exploitation of marine resources. This is analyzed using survey data of fishers’ perceptions of illegalities and harmful impacts of their own and other fishing fleets and segments. Relations between competing fleets and segments are observed through the intergroup blame attribution model. The results confirmed both hypotheses: that fishers tend to attribute less blame to their own group (ingroup) and more to others (outgroups), exhibiting ingroup favoritism when attributing blame (H1); and that blame attribution increases with structural distance between fishing fleets (H2). The methodological approach includes a two-step procedure based on Kruskal-Wallis test, ordinal logistic regression, and Spearman's rank-order correlation, conducted on a sample of 567 respondents active in small-scale and large-scale commercial fishing, recreational fishing, and subsistence fishing, in Croatia.

The paper is available at the link.