The Quest for Sustainable Community-Based Livelihoods

Catalog description

This is an experiential education course designed to allow students to learn first-hand about "community," and "sustainable development" perspectives, and how both come together in the context of the marine environment. To do this, the class creates the conditions so students can interact as directly as possible with individuals engaging and depending on the ocean to sustain their livelihoods from a diversity of perspectives. We choose the Gulf of California in Mexico as an illustration because of its prominence as a region of high biodiversity and conservation interest, and its history with community-based sustainable development and conservation. Students must read key theoretical literature on the commons, sustainable development, community-based conservation, self-governance, small-scale fisheries, commoning, food systems, knowledge(s), indigenous peoples, and methods for collecting social science data in the field. We also read about the specifics of the local culture and natural history before traveling to the region. Once there we visit with fishers, conservation practitioners, tourism operators, marine protected area managers, indigenous people, and others. During our visits we use the newly acquired theory we have read to deconstruct and understand how local stakeholders view, practice, and govern their interactions with the ocean. This allows us to understand how and why they define community, conservation, sustainability in the ways they do, and put that back into a global perspective by asking what does this mean to the way we debate, articulate community, conservation and sustainable development? We also visit the places that are the object of these conceptualizations. We ask students to bring out their inner natural historian and explorer-selves, while experiencing first-hand the rich cultural and natural history we are immersed in. Together with an…