From Vulnerability to Viability in Small-Scale Fisheries: A Thematic Synthesis on Justice, Knowledge, and the Making of Transition

Abstract

Small-scale fisheries (SSF) sustain the livelihoods, food security, and cultural identities of approximately 500 million people globally, yet they face profound and compounding vulnerabilities arising from climate change, colonial dispossession, institutional exclusion, and the displacement pressures of an expanding blue economy. Despite their global significance, no systematic synthesis of the knowledge produced through the V2V Global Partnership Thematic Webinar Series has previously been conducted, leaving five years of transdisciplinary expert discourse inaccessible as a coherent scholarly contribution. This qualitative study addresses that gap through a reflexive thematic analysis of all 59 V2V thematic webinar sessions spanning January 2021 to December 2025, conducted within a constructivist paradigm and guided by an original tri-layered conceptual framework called the V2V Transition Ecosystem, which integrates the V2V vulnerability-to-viability core axis, the blue justice evaluative lens, and social-ecological systems theory. The analysis identified 74 codes across three research questions, organized into Core, Emerging, and New classifications and tracked temporally across five years. Five key findings emerge: the V2V webinar series documents a paradigmatic shift from vulnerability management to justice assertion; the five vulnerability types present across all five years are structural features of the global political economy of fisheries rather than developmental deficits; the eight Core transitional pathways are all fundamentally social, political, and relational rather than technical, and successful transitions consistently require multiple reinforcing pathways operating simultaneously; most theoretically consequential, the integrated analysis confirms a justice-viability nexus in which justice and viability are mutually constitutive, with every major vulnerability corresponding to a specific justice failure and every major pathway operating through a specific justice mechanism; and the rate of new thematic content declined sharply by 2025, suggesting that within the five-year period studied, the series had converged on a stable core conceptual framework for understanding SSF transitions, a pattern this thesis interprets as a feature of the period analyzed rather than a claim about the long-term trajectory of an ongoing knowledge platform. This thesis advances three principal theoretical contributions: the V2V Transition Ecosystem, an original tri-layered framework integrating the vulnerability-to-viability axis, the blue justice lens, and social-ecological systems theory; an original typology of five SSF vulnerability-viability transition contexts mapping specific vulnerability configurations to effective pathway combinations; and the justice-viability nexus, demonstrating that justice and viability are mutually constitutive rather than separate objectives - with direct implications for SSF policymakers, development organizations, community organizations, and international governance bodies seeking to support just and durable SSF transitions from vulnerability to viability.