Telling Fish Tales: The Role of Narratives in Social Ecological System Interventions

“Social ecological systems” (SES) are circumstances where human activity and the natural world are interconnected and reciprocally influential. Ensuring these systems benefit the broader social and ecological communities is increasingly important as human activity grows. We aimed to provide novel insights about how workers make decisions about intervening in SES. We examined 32 SES fisheries interventions in British Columbia, Canada, through interviews and archival sources. We uncovered a narrative structure to those descriptions, wherein workers who were experts in fisheries management decided which purpose or purposes a system should serve, whether the system was serving those purposes, and what was causing any problems. These decisions then informed recommended interventions. We uncovered novel dimensions of those interventions, as well as what we termed “narratives of clashes,” where other stakeholders put forward differing accounts of what was happening in a SES. These clashes often forestalled the implementation of recommended interventions, with implications for the functioning of SES and how these workers felt about their jobs.