Submit a Manuscript to the Journal
Society & Natural Resources
For a Special Issue on
The Morality of Non-Compliance in Capture Fisheries
Manuscript deadline
Special Issue Editor(s)
Dražen Cepić,
Institute for Social Research in Zagreb, Croatia
[email protected]
Milena Arias Schreiber,
World Maritime University, Sweden
[email protected]
Hugo M. Ballesteros,
University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain
[email protected]
Liz Drury O’Neill,
Stockholm Resilience Centre, Sweden
[email protected]
Jaime Ramón Bruquetas,
University of La Laguna, Spain
[email protected]
Gonzalo Rodríguez Rodríguez,
University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain
[email protected]
The Morality of Non-Compliance in Capture Fisheries
Research on illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing has traditionally been dominated by deterrence-based and enforcement-focused approaches, which often conceptualise fishers primarily as offenders. While critical scholarship has increasingly highlighted structural drivers such as poverty, livelihood vulnerability, regulatory failure, and weak legitimacy, less attention has been paid to the moral and cognitive dimensions of non-compliance.
This Special Issue seeks to reframe non-compliance in capture fisheries as a moral, cultural, and cognitive phenomenon, rather than solely a legal or enforcement issue. It builds on legal pluralism and related perspectives that emphasise the coexistence of multiple normative orders, where practices deemed illegal under state law may nonetheless be perceived as legitimate within local, customary, or community-based systems.
The aim is to develop comparative and interdisciplinary insights into how compliance and non-compliance are understood, justified, and enacted across diverse fisheries contexts.
We invite contributions that:
- Explore how fishers and fishery actors perceive, justify, and negotiate compliance and non-compliance, including the role of legitimacy and moral reasoning
- Examine the coexistence of state law, community norms, and customary practices in shaping fishing behaviour
- Analyse how IUU fishing is constructed and experienced across different socio-economic and political contexts
- Critically interrogate binary framings of legality (legal/illegal; compliant/non-compliant) and instead explore continuums of legitimacy
- Compare large-scale, small-scale, subsistence, gleaning, and recreational fisheries
- Integrate insights from anthropology, sociology, political ecology, economics, geography, criminology, and related fields
We particularly welcome:
- Comparative and cross-national analyses
- Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods studies
- Case studies from diverse geographic and ecological contexts (marine, coastal, estuarine, freshwater, inland fisheries)
- Theoretical and empirical contributions
Submission Instructions
All manuscripts must be submitted via the Society & Natural Resources online submission system. Authors should select the Special Issue option: “The Morality of Non-Compliance in Capture Fisheries” during submission.
Manuscripts will undergo the journal’s standard peer-review process.
- Submissions are welcome from both invited and non-invited authors
- There is no requirement to submit an abstract prior to manuscript submission
- If a manuscript is intended for this Special Issue, authors should clearly indicate this during submission by selecting the Special Issue option
- All papers will be subject to double-blind peer review in line with journal standards
- Manuscripts will be considered on a rolling basis and will be sent into peer review upon receipt if deemed suitable