Failing forward: How policies can integrate the dynamics of cooperation as a pathway for fisheries resilience

The success of ocean conservation depends largely on cooperation from diverse stakeholders such as fishers through their daily decisions at sea. Why do some fisheries management efforts catalyze durable cooperation, while others unravel despite strong ecological design? In this talk, I examine fisheries governance through the lens of collective action dynamics, focusing on the policies and social tipping points that spark cooperation and the feedback loops that sustain (or undermine) it through time. Drawing on comparative, mixed-methods research across small-scale fisheries in Mexico and French Polynesia, I analyze how trust, legitimacy, and perceived fairness shape the emergence of compliance and collective stewardship under conditions of uncertainty and change. I show that governance tools such as temporary fisheries closures function not as static interventions, but as dynamic social-ecological experiments in which design, behavior, and visibility of benefits generate reinforcing feedbacks – and, in some cases, mistrust and failure. By identifying shared pathways through which collective action begins, stabilizes, or fails, this work brings a message of hope: humans are hardwired for cooperation and adaptation, and policies are avenues to rewrite the rules of the game.