Community interventions drive support for fisheries regulations and influence compliance: Lessons from the Philippines

Compliance is a critical element of sustainable fisheries management, and particularly for small-scale fisheries, where enforcement capabilities may be limited. Improving fisheries management outcomes requires an understanding of how to promote compliance with fisheries management laws and regulations. The USAID-funded Fish Right program (2018–2025) was designed to increase compliance with fisheries management, as well as to implement sustainable fisheries management in three regions of the Philippines. This study reports on small-scale fishers' support for fisheries management activities in the Philippines, as well as their reported compliance with a registration requirement, collected from household surveys conducted in three regions of the Philippines during two time periods (2019 and 2023), at the start of and five years into the Fish Right program. An increase in survey respondents’ support for requiring fishing permits and fishing closed seasons was observed between two time periods, suggesting Fish Right activities were successful in increasing management support. Households also reported moderate-to-high compliance with a vessel registration requirement. However, both support for management and compliance differed among the three regions, suggesting that differences in target fisheries, culture, and the specifics of the Fish Right interventions all play a role in determining compliance. Overall, the regions with higher community-level engagement saw greater an increase in management support and compliance. Fish Right community engagement innovations including the use of community champions may provide a successful model for intervention to increase compliance in SSF elsewhere in the world.