L'apport des syntheses regionales perspectives historiques et institutionnelles sur la recherche interdisciplinaire dans le domaine des peches artisanales.

Each of nine people agreed to write a summary regarding changes in research on small-scale fishing in a large region of the world. These summaries that will be presented to you focus respectively on changes in research in Southeast Asia, in the South Pacific along the western coast of Latin America, in West Africa, in the Mediterranean, in Northwest Europe, and in North America. In order to help you reconstruct their actions in the halieutic context of the regions about which they are talking, Serge Garcia will first present us with a panorama of small-scale fishing. By asking them to do this study, we wished to be able to place the symposium's study within an overall framework and in an historical perspective. The objective was to relativise the conclusions that could be drawn from analyses of local situations, or, on the contrary, to allow them to be generalised by using bases of comparison. The summaries are far from being able to offer a planetary geographical coverage, just as they do not really include the evolution of all disciplines. The means available to the organisers did not allow for going up to that point. We must at this point thank the authors who agreed to do this complex work of summarisation, because they succeeded in showing the richness of such a step, which the participants will be able to appreciate in their reports. In this analysis of geographical syntheses, we would like to draw a few comparisons able to fuel the symposium's debates. We will examine how small-scale fishing became a subject of research, and the difficulty of defining it. Then we will see how the various disciplines became mutually involved, then specialised, depending upon the stages through which the research passed on this subject. The role of institutions and the weight of the contextual environment will be examined. Finally, we will propose a few possible directions for the debates on various themes of the symposium. Some outside contributions to the summaries also focus on the evolution of the research and we have taken that into account in this presentation. Limited to one country (Yahaya Jahara) or to one province (Maneschy and Furtado), they are useful complements to the summaries.