Can women's participation in decision making promote sustainable fisheries management? Evidence from a choice experiment with fishermen and their wives

Despite the crucial role of fishermen's wives in small-scale fisheries, fisheries management research often relies on fishermen as sole household representatives. As a result, limited attention is given to how household fisheries management decisions are formed and how wives contribute to shaping these decisions. This study addresses this gap by engaging both fishermen and their wives to examine household preferences for sustainable fisheries management decisions. Using a split-sample choice experiment, we compared the individual preferences of fishermen and their wives alongside couples' joint preferences. Results show that couples' joint preferences for fisheries management attributes tend to fall between the individual choices of fishermen and their wives, suggesting that household fisheries management decisions are shaped through intra-household negotiation and compromise between husbands and wives. Couples' joint choices were also more aligned with sustainable fishing practices than those of fishermen alone, indicating that wives may play an important role in encouraging more sustainability-oriented household decisions. In addition, wives' involvement in intra-household joint decision-making influenced compensation trade-offs and contributed to greater certainty in decision-making. These findings highlight that wives already influence fisheries-related household decisions, yet their contributions remain insufficiently recognised within fisheries management research and formal governance processes. We therefore urge researchers and policymakers to recognise households as joint decision-making units and to engage more directly with wives in fisheries research, data collection, and management processes, rather than relying solely on fishermen as household representatives.