Participatory Extension to the Sustainability of Artisanal Fisheries

Abstract

The present work consists in a methodological proposal for the fishing activity extension project. It will be coordinated by a Production Engineering Program team from COPPE/UFRJ, focusing on the Natural Resources Management for the sustainability of the marine artisanal fishing in a southeastern Brazil seaside region. Such proposed methodology is interactive and it is recursively developed, configuring it through a dialogic advice. This methodology assumes that the whole problem is of complex extension, making essentially the interdisciplinary and interaction approaches. Therewith, the resolution problems in the handmade fishery department may be performed by sharing scientific and traditional marine knowledge. In this way, the approach is an alternative to the linear and anti-dialogical conception, as it was denounced by Paulo Freire in his seminal work "Comunicação ou Extensão?" (Communication or Extension?), about the extension in Brazil. This methodology founded the Brazilian government fishery extension politics between the last century's sixties and seventies, whose outcome was harmful to the country coastal, estuarine and seafarers ecosystems, affecting their productivity and artisanal fishing itself: rapid urban expansion, rampant growth of tourism with the devaluation of the local cultures, location of industrial parks, pollution, construction of roads, lack of sanitation and others. The purpose of this article is to provide a methodological framework for extension projects that is appropriate to the complexity of artisanal fisheries, characterized by multi-species and associated patterns of regularity of marine ecosystems interventions whose dynamics is highly uncertain with random and chaotic movements. Its main theoretical references comprise three perspectives: (a) the reciprocal implications between theory and practice of action research, (b) the essential communication and language in the instruments of participatory methodologies, (c) management by processes in community-based of small-scale fishers. These perspectives, in turn, are theoretically grounded in two fields of interdisciplinary studies: Ethno-science and Socio-cognition.