Advancing Collaborative Fisheries Governance Through Multispecies Stock Assessment in the Gulf of Thailand: A GoTFish-Supported Partnership Mechanism for Sub-regional Fisheries Management

Abstract

Small-scale fisheries in the Gulf of Thailand depend heavily on shared pelagic resources–particularly short mackerel and anchovy–characterized by multispecies interactions, seasonal variability, and transboundary distribution. Effective management remains challenging due to fragmented assessment approaches, persistent data limitations, and the need to strengthen collaboration and trust among countries and stakeholders sharing the Gulf of Thailand.

This article introduces a GoTFish-supported partnership mechanism designed to advance collaborative governance through a multispecies stock assessment framework for shared pelagic fisheries. In Thailand, this framework is currently applied at the national level to inform fisheries management decisions, including the setting of effort limits for pelagic species. By explicitly accounting for species interactions and cumulative fishing pressures, the approach provides a more robust and policy-relevant basis for management than conventional single-species assessments.

Within Thai waters, ecosystem-based fisheries management (EBFM) has also been implemented using ecosystem indicators, complementing the multispecies assessment framework with plans to progressively expand EBFM to the sub-regional scale.

Rather than pursuing immediate harmonization of management measures, the GoTFish-supported mechanism prioritized alignment of analytical concepts, transparency of assumptions, and shared interpretation of results as foundations for collaboration and confidence-building. The paper further illustrates how this approach supports sustainable small-scale fisheries while maintaining functional coastal and marine ecosystems, contributing to resilient livelihoods, reduced conflicts, and enhanced ecosystem stability in shared, multispecies, and data-limited fisheries systems.