Abstract

The Gulf and Caribbean region, like many other parts of the world, is littered with failed or failing fisheries projects. They come in all sorts, shapes, and sizes. Under the rubric of fisheries governance, with its emphasis on civil society participation as an expected factor of success, of particular interest are projects that involve state fisheries authorities or fisherfolk non-governmental organizations and external donor agencies. Such project partnerships, if well designed, are intended to yield win-win outcomes. In this paper I examine the proposition that perhaps these projects are short term win-win, even if they truly fail in the long term. Such ‘beneficial’ failure may be the result of collusion amongst the actors that has serious implications for governance. Project failure (in its literal sense) is easier to define than success. The key is to refer to agreed goals and objectives. Goal displacement, adaptation or other adjustments must be taken into account. Still, observations suggest that it is not uncommon for grantees to ‘almost succeed’ on a recurring basis that provides the grantors with opportunities to continue funding the same grantees, and to forecast the likely outcomes. This fine-tuning of failure perpetuates a mutually beneficial supply and demand until some perturbation breaks the cycle. Fine-tuning failure is a coping strategy that constrains self-organization, adaptive capacity and resilience in fisheries governance.