Fisheries Cooperatives and the Resilience of Small-Scale Fishing Communities: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Within the sociology of development, community-based cooperatives represent a pivotal Third-Sector mechanism for driving equitable, democratic, and place-centered transformation. However, institutionalizing collective action within small-scale maritime fisheries introduces complex challenges regarding asset distribution, market asymmetries, and internal power dynamics. While individual empirical studies have explored localized cooperative performance, there is a distinct lack of systematic, theoretically integrated syntheses mapping their structural and multi-dimensional functions globally. Adhering to the RepOrting Standards for Systematic Evidence Syntheses (ROSES) protocol, this study executed a systematic literature review across the Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar databases to evaluate peer-reviewed empirical research from a ten-year temporal window (2013–2023). Utilizing a manual thematic analysis and an integrative synthesis framework, the corpus was abstracted into five primary institutional dimensions: socio-demographic asset profiles, operational governance frameworks, multi-channel accessibility, economic resilience architecture, and psychosocial dynamics. The findings reveal that while fisheries cooperatives successfully decouple asset vulnerability from resource appropriation and mitigate market disparities, their long-term efficacy is frequently threatened by structural power imbalances, gender stratification, and bureaucratic friction. By synthesizing these diverse qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-method research designs, this paper moves beyond localized descriptions to expand the conceptual boundaries of Elinor Ostrom’s Common-Pool Resource (CPR) governance theory. Ultimately, this review offers a unified institutional matrix providing highly transferable insights for optimizing cooperative policy and sustainable coastal development across emerging maritime economies globally.