Exploring interconnections between local ecological knowledge, professional identity and sense of place among Swedish fishers

Abstract

The ecological knowledge of those who interact with ecosystems in everyday-life is situated in social and cultural contexts, as well as accumulated, transferred and adjusted through work practices. For them, ecosystems represent not only places for living but also places for working and defining themselves. This paper explores psychological aspects linking LEK/IEK/TEK to identity and sense of place in the context of fishery practices and management in Sweden. We analyse how knowledge of local ecosystems connect to fishers’ professional identity and their attachment to place by using the Person-Process-Place framework in integration with the Structure-Dynamic-Function framework on professional fishers in Sweden. On the basis of our results we conclude on the significance of physical as well as social and cultural features of fishing places for attachment and meaning as they are important for fishers’ local and professional identities, and also for ecological knowledge generation. Furthermore, fishers’ understanding of ecosystems complexity enhances their attachment and promotes positive emotions and behaviours for proximity maintenance.

Keywords:

• fishers
• LEK
• sense of place
• cognition
• identity
• natural resource management
• emotions
• proximity maintenance

Acknowledgements

We also wish to thank the Wallenberg Foundation for travel funding in 2011 and the County Administrative Boards in Jönköping and Blekinge (Sweden) for the information and assistance provided. We thank all the 20 fishers that participated voluntarily in this study for their invaluable contributions, opening the doors to their homes, answering our questions and sharing their feelings and family memories. We thank Beatrice Crona for her valuable advice, and Jens Bengtsson for putting us in contact with the fishers in Blekinge. Finally, we thank the Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM and the Pacific Ecoinformatics and Computational Ecology Lab ‘PEaCE’, Berkeley CA, especially to our colleagues Jennifer Dunne, Neo Martinez and Eric Berlow for their academic collaboration regarding complexity in ecosystems.

Notes

1. Referring to LEK as ‘local ecological knowledge’, TEK as ‘traditional ecological knowledge’, and IEK as ‘indigenous ecological knowledge’.

2. There is an over-fishing of European eel according to scientists.

3. The cod in the Baltic Sea underwent a boom and bust development during the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s.

Additional information

Funding

This study is part of the project ‘Ecological knowledge and sustainable resource management: The role of knowledge acquisition in enhancing the adaptive capacity of co-management arrangements’ funded by the Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development.