Illuminating small-scale fishers' adaptation strategies to COVID-19: Navigating the challenges in Peruvian coastal communities

Peru experienced the highest excess number of deaths relating to COVID-19 of anywhere in the world. Despite the implementation of national and international regulations to control the advance of the pandemic, fishers’ settlements developed their own adaptation strategies to resist the complex economic impacts of such measures. This paper examines the adaptation strategies employed by twelve fishing communities in northern Peru. Specifically, it explores the potential of Community Capitals Framework for interpreting the adaptation strategies developed to responded to the pandemic’s constraints. Data was collected from fishers, fish farmers, local stakeholders and female household members. Representing a methodological innovation under pandemic restrictions, the latter also played a key role in data validation. We identified four groups of thematic strategies: improvement of financial and market access at the household level, implementation of formal rules based on health concerns, collective construction of informal rules to withstand health and economic impacts in the settlements and bottom-up coping strategies at the household level. Findings suggest that a diverse set of capitals were used in underpinning adaptive strategies. Human, built and social capitals were key to supporting livelihoods at the household level. At the collective level, Social, human, political and financial capitals were used to support local governance structures. We conclude that faced with unprecedented challenges, fishers’ and fish farmers and their families developed adaptive strategies that combined multiple forms of local effort, reflected at the household and collective levels, which in turn, raise questions about the lack of an efficient governmental support in times of crisis.