Exploring pathways to the persistence of fisheries co-management across social-ecological archetypes

Co-management can balance resource use with conservation, yet its persistence remains poorly understood. Identifying the extent and conditions of sustained co-management is critical for assessing progress toward conservation targets and designing scalable strategies. However, systematic evaluations of persistence across social and biophysical contexts remain scarce. We analyze 750 co-management initiatives established under Chile’s Territorial User Rights for Fishing policy between 1998 and 2021, assessing their persistence across conditions known to influence collective action. Using interpretable cluster analysis, we identified three social-ecological archetypes and applied survival analysis to evaluate their persistence. Nationally, initiatives had a 75% probability of persisting beyond 15 years. The archetype with the highest initial resource abundance showed the greatest persistence (84%), while another—despite low initial abundance—achieved similarly high persistence (78%) when coupled with low surveillance costs, high dependence, proximity to markets, and high ecosystem’s productivity. In contrast, the archetype characterized by low dependence, high surveillance costs, and low abundance and productivity persisted at much lower rates (54%). These results highlight multiple pathways to enduring co-management and offer novel insights to guide testable hypotheses. They also underscore the importance of tracking persistence and abandonment to inform adaptive, context-specific policies delivering lasting benefits for people and nature.