Adaptive Fisheries Governance in Changing Coastal Regions in Japan

Japan’s fisheries sector is undergoing a major restructuring. The coastal ecological change and natural disasters such as tsunami demand that communities transform or organize resource governance anew. Under the national policy of decentralization to cope with the aging and declining population, the availability of local infrastructure, both physical and social, plays a significant role in the adaptive capacity of the community. This book presents the historical and spatial dynamics of coastal fisheries resource governance in response to different environmental changes, its socio-political context, and challenges raised by academicians. The reader will find the national trends and geographical patterns of the administrative restructuring in the communities and fisheries cooperatives from abundant maps and figures, as well as a rich description of adaptive governance in the scale of region and community by ecological-historical approaches. Comparative analysis of the communities provides a practical framework to understand a variety of local resources in Japan’s coastal regions, which will serve as a guide to the development of alternative adaptive governance in community-based small-scale fisheries in the world.