Co-management is now established as a mainstream approach to small-scale fisheries management
across the developing world. A comprehensive review of 204 potential cases reveals a lack of impact
assessments of fisheries co-management. This study reports on a meta-analysis of the impact of fisheries
co-management in developing countries in 90 sites across 29 case-studies. The top five most frequently
measured process indicators are participation, influence, rule compliance, control over resources, and
conflict. The top five most frequently measured outcome indicators are access to resources, resource
well-being, fishery yield, household well-being, and household income. To deal with the diversity of the
52 indicators measured and the different ways these data are collected and analysed, we apply a coding
system to capture change over time. The results of the meta-analysis suggest that, overall fisheries comanagement
delivers benefits to end-users through improvements in key process and outcome indicators.
However, the dataset as a whole is constituted primarily of data from the Philippines. When we
exclude this body of work, few generalisations can be made about the impact of fisheries co-management.
The lack of comparative data suitable for impact assessment and the difficulties in comparing data
and generalising across countries and regions reiterates calls in other fields for more systematic
approaches to understanding and evaluating governance frameworks.