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High demand and prices in global markets for luxury seafood fished by coastal communities in low-income contexts causes overfishing. There are few alternatives for fishers to earn money, most institutions for controlling effort are weak, and markets are beyond the control of fishing states. The mismatch between desires for development and governance measures to enable that development is shared across many high-value low-income contexts. Using the sea cucumber fishery of Papua New Guinea as an example, this paper illustrates how the interactive governance framework provides a holistic approach to revealing governability limits and opportunities. Analysis of the system to be governed demonstrates that development for coastal communities is fundamental to the fishery as a motivating force and as a principle legitimising actions within the fishery and its management. This analysis highlights the fact that fisheries management is based on the assumption that an open fishery will lead to development, due to its economic value. However, money does not equal development. For this and other similar fisheries to increase development in coastal communities, issues not usually considered within the purview of the management of fisheries must be addressed, including gendered and intergenerational decision-making and income distribution, financial planning and government provision of infrastructure and services.

The world's remaining biodiversity-rich regions are often located in borderlands or physically remote areas which are frequently also inhabited by stateless peoples, who are then subjected to policies expressly designed to exclude or restrict local livelihood activities. This situation has been exacerbated by the tendency for international non-governmental organisations to join forces with the State to promote their conservation agenda. Whilst the political and environmental implications of this trend have been explored within the academic literature, the consequences for the survival of disempowered and marginalised stateless communities have received little attention. This article will focus upon stateless peoples enmeshed within a policy framework influenced by globalised environmental priorities and directed by international conservation NGOs in South-East Asia. It will explore how stateless peoples' capacities are undermined by models of 'participation' used by these actors and underline the importance of recognising stateless peoples' rights and responsibilities in marine natural resource management.

The blue economy is a globally emerging concept for ocean governance that seeks to tap the economic potential of the oceans in environmentally sustainable ways. Yet, understanding and implementation of particular visions of the blue economy in specific regions diverge according to national and other contexts. Drawing on a discourse analysis of Chinese language documents, this article assesses how the blue economy has been conceptualised in Chinese state policy and discourse. Part of a state ideology and practice of modernisation that is defined in terms of rejuvenation under a strong state, the blue economy in China is seen as an opportunity to promote modernisation from overlapping economic, geopolitical and ecological perspectives and actions. China's distinctive model for the blue economy presents emerging challenges for global ocean governance.

Ecosystem services have become a dominant paradigm for understanding how people derive well-being from ecosystems. However, the framework has been critiqued for over-emphasizing the availability of services as a proxy for benefits, and thus missing the socially-stratified ways that people access ecosys- tem services. We aim to contribute to ecosystem services' theoretical treatment of access by drawing on ideas from political ecology (legitimacy) and anthropology (entanglement). We hypothesize that where customary and modern forms of resource management co-exist, changes in customary institutions will also change people's ability to and means of benefiting from ecosystem services, with implications for well-being. We ask a) what are the constellations of social, economic, and institutional mechanisms that enable or hinder access to a range of provisioning ecosystem services; and b) how are these constellations shifting as different elements of customary institutions gain or lose legitimacy in the process of entangle- ment with modernity? Through a qualitative mixed-methods case study in a coastal atoll community in Papua New Guinea, we identify key access mechanisms across the value chain of marine provisioning ser- vices. Our study finds the legitimacy of customary systems – and thus their power in shaping access – has eroded unevenly for some ecosystem services, and some people within the community (e.g. younger men), and less for others (e.g. women), and that different marine provisioning services are shaped by specific access mechanisms, which vary along the value chain. Our findings suggest that attention to entanglement and legitimacy can help ecosystem services approaches capture the dynamic and relational aspects of power that shape how people navigate access to resources in a changing world. We contend that viewing power as relational illuminates how customary institutions lose or gain legitimacy as they become entangled with modernity.

The Asia-Pacific's Coral Triangle is defined by its extremely high marine biodiversity. Over one hundred million people living in its coastal zones use this biodiversity to support their livelihoods. Hundreds of millions more derive nutritious food directly from the region′s marine resources and through local, regional and global trade. Biodiversity and its values to society are threatened by demographic and habitat change, rising demand, intensive harvesting and climate change. In partnership with international conservation organisations and development funders, the governments of the region′s six countries have come together to develop the Coral Triangle Initiative (CTI) on Coral Reefs, Fisheries and Food Security. The CTI has explicit goals and defined targets for marine biodiversity conservation, but not for the food security of the region′s marine-resource dependent people, despite this being the wider aim used to justify conservation action. This article suggests how the food security aim of the CTI could be made more explicit. It outlines the complex pathways linking marine biodiversity with food security and argues that improved social science analysis, inter-sectoral policy and management interactions are necessary if conserving marine biodiversity is to contribute towards meeting food security challenges in the region.