Prospects for Small-Scale Aquaculture in Chile: User Rights and Locations

The data covers the socioeconomically and bio geographically diverse Los Lagos region in southern Chile. This region is characterized by economic activities based on natural resources, in-cluding cattle raising/livestock farming, forestry, aquaculture (especially salmon production and mussel growing), and seafood extraction. Before collecting the data, we conducted personal semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders, including leaders of artisanal fishers organizations, organizational leaders from fisher villages, government officials working in fisheries and aquaculture regulatory agencies (central and regional level), artisanal fishers, and members of coastal communities who perform marine economic activities. Rather than abandoning fishing to become aquaculture producers, interviewed stakeholders describe a gradual process in which fishers take on additional activities to address the observed decline in wild fisheries profitability. These interviews identified three central characteristics of the households and setting that informed our data collection and empirical approach: user rights, heterogeneous biogeographic zones, and low propensity to move. Armed with stakeholder information about the region’s population and aquaculture, we developed a purpose-specific household survey. We administered the field survey to a sample of households from coastal communities located across the ecologically and socioeconomically diverse Los Lagos region in southern Chile. The sample was selected by a two-step procedure. In the first step, we selected villages/coastal communities, and in the second step we chose households in these locations. The selection of villages/coastal communities followed an intentional selection procedure that chose the locations proportional to the total number of artisanal fishermen, which generates a representative village sample of the total fishermen in the selected area. The household selection procedure in each village consisted of contacting a local leader (i.e., president of a local union) to obtain basic information that allowed the enumerators to identify households within a resource rights holder group to be surveyed. Using a snowball approach, other households in the village were chosen using information from previously interviewed households about households both in and out of that resource rights holder organization. We implemented the survey with members of 316 households from 73 fishing villages and 8 municipalities.The household survey collects household socio demographic information; economic and live-lihood activities and income sources for each household member; the intensity of marine economic activities undertaken for each month of the last year; the household productive assets for marine activities; and motivations for the household’s choices of marine activities. To address the importance of user rights to activity choices, we asked about the organizations to which each household member belongs. To generate household-level information about biogeographic zones,we also asked about respondents’ perceptions of the biogeographic conditions under which the household selects and carries out its marine economic activities.