Activities

The Alliance promotes sustainable fisheries and aquaculture practices through the application of a system-wide approach that balances economic, environmental, governmental, and social components essential to enhancing livelihoods and biodiversity. Supported by the U.S. Government and partners, G-FISH brings together government, private sector, and civil society to work collaboratively on specific fisheries around the world.

Reforming fisheries requires strong local engagement of the stakeholders involved in the value chain to ensure a locally-driven and owned process. A systems approach to fisheries can improve the impact of development assistance to the sector by identifying and targeting the key leverages points with appropriate technical assistance, from changing individual and stakeholder group behaviors to strengthening institutions to changing economic incentives. Over the last 15 years, FHI 360 has developed and refined a systems approach to social change, the System-wide Collaborative Action for Livelihoods and the Environment (SCALE) approach. SCALE is a communications-driven management approach that results in greater impact at scale, creating social capital, strengthening governance, and increasing sustainable economic growth and livelihoods. This innovative approach provides all stakeholders with a common road map to identify resources within the system, focus on gaps in technical expertise, and evaluate, initiate, and implement system-wide collaboration for wide-scale impact. To better ensure a sustainable systematic solution, a project must engage all individuals and organizations who have a vested interest in fisheries. The end result is that stakeholders become committed to implementing action plans created together and sharing resources, thus translating ownership of the issue into local leadership structures. G-FISH seeks to empower people to become the drivers of their own development process by strengthening their capacity for informed decision making and sustainable, collaborative action.