Scoping review of marine fisheries governance in the Philippines: Goals, instruments, actions, opportunities and challenges

Effective fisheries governance has long been a challenge to achieve across the globe with critical implications for food security and livelihoods in coastal zones. This is especially true for the Philippines, an archipelagic country with abundant coastal biodiversity. While scholars have investigated specific elements of fisheries governance in the Philippines, none has sought to make holistic sense in terms of the coherence of its goals, instruments, actions, opportunities, and challenges. To address this gap, a scoping review was conducted based upon 160 published articles. Results of the study reveal that marine fisheries governance in the Philippines is primarily dominated by participatory governance, specifically co-management, which encourages public-private partnerships. This collaborative arrangement is legally empowered by legislation that provides the mandate for the decentralization of fisheries governance – the Local Government Code of 1991 and the Philippine Fisheries Code of 1998. Marine fisheries governance is primarily oriented towards biodiversity conservation, an overarching goal necessary to achieve other social, economic, and cultural goals. In order to achieve these goals, a combination of hard and soft instruments is typically employed in governance operations in tandem with, predominantly, surveillance and enforcement actions. Opportunities in fisheries governance are principally institutional factors (i.e. institutional linkages), whereas challenges are mostly resource-oriented factors (i.e. illegal fishing). More broadly, marine fisheries governance in the Philippines has evolved in response to historical political processes and especially the dynamics of power relations among key actors – the state, market and civil society - and the struggle for decolonization.