BESTTuna

Jacuna tuna fish landing. Puerto Princessa, Philippines.  © Jürgen Freund/WWF Canon

Introduction

The BESTTuna programme will run for five years and is divided into six subprojects:

Subproject 1:  two PhDs will investigate habitat choice of juvenile tuna in relation to local ecosystem productivity, and the socio-technical relationship with fishing strategies and tactics related to FADs.

Subproject 2: three PhDs focus on the interaction between state and market-based fisheries governance arrangements from local to international levels. They will analyse and model the capacity of government and inter-governmental scientific and regulatory regimes to adaptively manage tuna fisheries given trade-offs between access rights and market demand for sustainable fishing practices.

Subproject 3: two PhDs analyse the incentive structures for fishers targeting juvenile tuna for domestic and international canned markets, and how they are influenced by ‘upstream’ chain actors in the global canned tuna value chain.

Subproject 4: two PhD's and a Postdoc examine the possibility for novel market-based governance approaches in tuna fisheries. They will review and model the different institutional and financial designs of alternative resource settings and assess the relevance of these designs for tuna fisheries.

Subproject 5: one PhD will explore the cross-cutting issue of new informational challenges across the various governance arrangements.

Subproject 6: finally, the various sub-projects will be brought together and further theorized by a Postdoc drawing on the inter-disciplinary inputs from the other areas of investigation.

The partners

Wageningen University

Program Management and Scientific Co-ordination:

Environmental Policy Group, Aquaculture and Fisheries Group

Other Wageningen Partners:

          Wageningen Institute of Animal Sciences (WIAS)

          Aquaculture and Fisheries Group

Wageningen Institute of Social Sciences (WASS)

          Business Economics Group

          Environmental and Natural Resource Economics Group (also part of WIMEK)

Wageningen Institute for Environment and Climate Research (WIMEK)

          Environmental Policy Group

          Aquatic Ecology and Water Quality Management Group

Main Research Partners outside WUR

Bogor University, Faculty of Fisheries and Marine Science Centre for Coastal and marine Resource Studies, Bogor, Indonesia (IPB),

University of the Philippines in the Visayas(UPV),  College of Fisheries & Ocean Sciences, Iloilo, Philippines

University of the Philippines in Mindanao (UPM),  School of Management
Davao City, Philippines

University of the South Pacific, Faculty of Science Technology and Environment, Suva, Fiji

WWF Indonesia, Jakarta, Indonesia

WWF Philippines, Philippines

For our extended research network outside WUR, the policy relates network as well as Industry and Policy Partners see the research proposal (attached).