Research & Publications

My work in Zanzibar highlights a layer of market relations in the SSF VCs that are not generally captured by traditional VC or economic analysis (Fabinyi et al. 2018). These relations centre on assistance and reciprocity and include exchange or provision of cash-gifts, food, seafood products, services and loans within VC nodes, between them and beyond the VC. Tracing these interactions showed a wider influence of the Zanzibar VC, highlighting its horizontal elements – local social relations. It also brought to light previously unidentified actors, beyond fishers and trading-agents, that play a role in the market place. These actors, referred to in Paper I as auxiliary actors, are important to capture. A poor understanding of their influence on and from marine resource related benefits, risks undervaluing the contribution and importance of the environment to local livelihoods (Fröcklin 2014). This can skew efforts for conservation and poverty alleviation with negative effects for overlooked groups in society (Daw et al. 2016). Certain actor types (e.g. rural actors, especially fishermen using larger vessels) were more engrained in the Zanzibari informal assistance network. While others, like female urban traders, remain on the margins of these exchanges, leaving them potentially more vulnerable to short-term fluctuations in the fisheries and markets. Paper II shows that the safety-net function of assistance networks operated differently across cases. For example, exchanges between fishers and traders in Concepcion were limited to economic transactions and asymmetrical financial support from traders to fishers. In Zanzibar, fisher-trader relations were often reciprocal and spanned a wider array of exchanges, such as food and favours. Concepcion also differed from Zanzibar in that repayment of loans or other types of assistance (Concepcion fishers also exchange non-financial help) is typically required both within and between nodes. In contrast, gift-giving exchanges tended to more often mark trade interactions among Zanzibari actors. This gifting seems to reinforce social standing within the market environment. Such findings have commonalities with work by economic anthropologists and sociologists where actors in an economic environment are not only concerned with maximizing their production and income but also social standing, reputation, norms and rules of the context (Granovetter 1985, Ortiz 2005, Smelser and Swedberg 2005). Market related gift giving plays an important role across Tanzania’s agricultural markets (Eaton et al. 2007), and in the broader Swahili society (YahyaOthman 2009). Most societies at the local scale have evolved social processes, including customs and reciprocities, that are interlinked with economic exchanges (Smelser and Swedberg 2005). Such processes can promote human wellbeing in addition to ecosystem services (Butler & Oluoch-Kosura 2006), and thus are important to present in VC contexts. These results highlight the horizontal dimensions and safety-net functions of the VC, and how they are not easily separated from financial transactions or local social norms (Fabinyi 2013, Fabinyi et al. 2018). These are generally not analysed in relation to VC positions.

Paper I and II therefore contribute to a more realistic conceptualization of SSF markets. They present the importance of non-financial value creation in the VC for a better understanding of benefit flows in this context. I contribute to more recent work in commodity-chains and SSF that incorporate the importance of these social relations in market organization and operation (Fabinyi 2013). Specifically, I take a next step by mapping these relation-types as assistance and reciprocity in combination with the VC. These types of nuances are important as governance interventions with a poor understanding of the informal less visible market interactions risk undermining vulnerable actors’ options for short-term livelihood security.