Sarah Ebel

SARAH A. EBEL, then a graduate student at University of Maine, Orono, Maine, was awarded funding in April 2017 to aid research on ‘Policy, Agency, and Collective Action: A Multilevel Analysis of Chile’s Territorial User Rights in Fisheries Policy,’ supervised by Dr. Christina M. Beitl. Studies of collective action, the action taken by a group in pursuit of a shared interest, in natural resource settings are often limited to its role in the formation of institutions for resource management. This theoretical and empirical emphasis ignores the salient ways in which individuals are influenced by political structures and act collectively to contest policy. This research, situated in the Lakes Region of southern Chile, draws upon anthropological understandings of policy, structure, and human agency to elucidate how policy constrained or facilitated individual and institutional collective action and adaptation under Chile’s fisheries management policy, Territorial Use Rights in Fisheries (TURFs) after an environmental crisis in 2016’a harmful algal bloom, closed access to marine resource harvesting. Using participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and structured surveys for six months, this research explored individual and institutional collective action and adaptation to environmental change. Analysis of ethnographic and quantitative data demonstrated that individuals and institutions had different preferences for adaptation to environmental change at the local and regional scale. Individuals and institutions sought alternatives to the TURFs policy to protect the marine environment and their livelihoods, including the creation of marine protected areas and small-scale seaweed and shellfish aquaculture.