“In 2002, we hatched the idea of NOS to get closer to the on-the-ground changes needed to restore fisheries,” says co-founder Alejandro Robles. “The first milestone was in April, 2004, when we actually formed NOS with the intention of signing a sustainability agreement in the Gulf of California with the President of Mexico and the Governors of the four states surrounding the Gulf. The second milestone came in June of 2005, when we decided to bring together the fishermen, the NGOs, and a fishing company to agree on actually developing the organization for the first time on the ground.”
Robles had been working in international NGOs for seventeen years when he founded NOS. “When I turned forty, I felt a bit empty…even when people were saying that I was so lucky to be working on saving such beautiful places [through biodiversity preservation]. As a VP in D.C, I was working on conservation issues from a very specifically biological angle.” The idea of NOS emerged from wanting to get closer to where change needed to happen in fishing communities and “to work from a broader, more systemic angle.”
“Growing up in Tampico,” Robles says, “I met the ocean before I was even able to walk. When I was five, my father and I were snorkeling around the beautiful Vera Cruz Sacrificio Island. He put the mask on me and I had this vivid image of so many colorful little fish while I was swimming about. That truly imprinted itself on me. Later, I became hooked on science, and science became my religion.”
But in Robles’s professional work, when he combined his instinct for “seeing the whole system” with his science–based NGO duties, he found that the two did not mesh smoothly. “We kept being advised to ‘not to lose our focus’ by getting involved in ‘too many projects.’ [But] I found myself continually wondering, how do you balance seeing the whole system with seeing its component parts? Without getting lost and dispersed in too many interventions? When NOS was established, I connected again with a kind of core spiritual mission and ambition. NOS was not just a job; this was a way of life I was consciously choosing, and that felt right.”
In 2005-6, NOS became involved in a major project trying, as Robles puts it, “to bring to the table fishers and various NGOs in the Upper Gulf [of the Sea of Cortez] region to try and come up with an agreement that would help save the Vaquita, a small endangered porpoise unique to that region. Using a ‘conflict resolution’ approach to try to balance the different aims of fishers, scientists, and the government, the effort was moderately and temporarily successful. It had been a contentious problem, but we achieved an agreement.”
But Robles and his team soon discovered that there were no structures on the ground to facilitate the complex, evolving multi-stakeholder reality that would shape how the agreement was to be implemented. “The governmental structure mandated by the formal agreement was very typical in that it was very rigid, bureaucratic, and top-down, whereas the collection of fishers, fishing companies, and NGOs had started to bring together a more dispersed network that required creativity and a willingness to cooperate because no one person or organization held the power. So, we had very formal leaders who now operated in a virtual world…and we found out that these people behaved radically differently when they operated in this network versus the governmental structures.”
The experience left Robles and his NOS colleagues with many questions concerning the types of structures needed to support fluid, ever changing realities. It also made them think about the sorts of tools they would need. They clearly would need something far beyond static compromise methods like conflict resolution.
Seeking to explore new organizing structures on the ground, in January of 2006 NOS helped establish Grupo Bahia de La Paz, which later became Plataforma Bahia de La Paz, a multi-stakeholder network of collaboration dedicated to fostering a share vision for La Paz bay by implementing community enforcement activities and providing alternative livelihoods to fishers. This group focused its efforts on combatting illegal fishing within the bay of La Paz and gave birth in 2009 to what is now known as Red de Observadores Ciudadanos (ROC, or CO), a civil surveillance network. This was a pivotal development amidst NOS’s relocation to the middle of the Manglito fishing community in La Paz, which Robles oversaw. “We became so much closer to the day-to-day reality of this increasingly stressed fishing community,” he says, “and the surveillance needed to protect it. Now that we are finally harvesting [in 2017 and beyond], that surveillance is more important than ever.”