Assessing Georgia shrimping industry responses to external challenges

Shrimping in Georgia can be understood as a social-ecological system composed of interconnected elements including workforce, vessels, shrimp biomass, and commercial fishing infrastructure (such as docks for berthing and railways for maintenance and repair). Central to this system is access, or the ability of participants to use, maintain, and benefit from these resources. This system is shaped by exogenous (external) drivers, particularly, globalization, pollution, climate change, and coastal development which reconfigure access to economic and ecological resources. Our analysis draws upon two complementary bodies of literature: the Social-Ecological Systems (SES) Framework developed by Elinor Ostrom and scholarship on resilience. In particular, we engage with the tension between ecological resilience as introduced by C.S. Hollings and Lance Gunderson, and the social science approaches to resilience that position resilience as a positive contrast to vulnerability. Emprically, this paper is grounded in more than 13 years of ethnographic, mixed method research across coastal Georgia. This longitudinal approach allows us to assess how shrimpers navigate shifting conditions driven by a variety of exogenous drivers that influence their access to key SES resources. Our findings show that these exogenous drivers influence endogenous (internal) system elements such as enterprise, infrastructure and shrimp biomass through different pathways. These interacting pressures generate cascading effects across the SES, resulting in a simplified and degraded system with limited adaptive capacity, consistent with what the ecological resilience literature describes as maladaptive resilience. By bringing the SES framework into dialogue with resilience scholarship, this paper contributes to debates on change within an SES and maladaptive resilience in food systems. It also offers insights for fisheries management, coastal policy, and the governance of sustainable food systems.