How much in the clan are you? The community as an explanatory factor of the acceptance of poaching in small-scale fisheries

This work is an in-depth look at the acceptance of poaching in Galicia, exploring the role of the community in tolerating acts of non-compliance with shellfishing regulations in Noia, (Galicia, Northwest of Spain). Tolerated non-compliance attitudes were identified and as a result it was possible to define the motivations behind poaching and which individuals are potentially acceptable in the target community. It was concluded that formal access and withdrawal property rights to shellfishing resources are only granted by the formal users of the resources under certain circumstances, but, fundamentally, only to individuals who are recognised as belonging to the community. To this regard, the concept of community is what sustains the possibilities of co-managing the resources and the acceptance of certain shellfish poaching acts within the community in question. Once the possibility of acceptance was established, the perceptions of the shellfish harvesters were used to measure tolerance towards poaching by asking the following question: Up to what point can poaching be tolerable? The information used in this work was collected in 95 surveys carried out between February and April 2017.