Governing Across Scales: A Multi-Level, Participatory Governance Framework for Recreational Fisheries Sustainability in Southern Chile

Environmental governance in socio-ecological systems requires coordination among actors and institutions operating across different territorial and administrative scales. This study develops a multi-level environmental governance framework for recreational fisheries in the Toltén River Basin, southern Chile. A mixed-methods case study combined a socioeconomic survey of 188 stakeholders, semi-structured interviews with public-sector representatives, and participatory workshops conducted across the basin. Quantitative and qualitative evidence were integrated to identify governance challenges, territorial priorities, stakeholder roles, and opportunities for institutional coordination. The results identified resource-use pressures alongside institutional fragmentation, limited inter-municipal coordination, weak organisational capacity, and the limited availability of permanent mechanisms for collective action. Participatory mapping identified 61 priority areas for recreational fisheries and 74 conflict hotspots, highlighting the spatial extent of these challenges beyond municipal boundaries. Based on these findings, a governance framework was structured around municipal, river basin, and regional scales, linking local priorities with basin-scale coordination and regional planning. The framework builds on existing municipal and regional coordination mechanisms, while proposing basin-level coordination as a subsequent stage to strengthen cross-municipal articulation. The study illustrates how participatory processes can inform the development of place-based, multi-level governance arrangements for complex river basin systems and provides a case-based contribution to the study of recreational fisheries governance in territorially fragmented socio-ecological contexts.