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The Governing Small-scale Fishers project (GSF) brings together Canadian and international fisheries scholars and WorldFish scientists to think through the potential contributions of social wellbeing approach for fisheries governance. The project is largely conceptual, drawing on the extensive experience of the participants, with the incorporation of two to three rapid field visits for the purpose of checking developing ideas about the relevance of wellbeing. The overall goal of the GSF project is to improve the poverty-reduction outcomes of governance reforms in small-scale fisheries in developing countries. This will be achieved by developing a conceptual and practical understanding of how wellbeing considerations may be fully incorporated into fisheries governance reforms, and correspondingly into the design of fisheries management instruments.

Despite their beneficial nutritional properties, high storability, and tolerance for adverse growing conditions, small millets have been consistently passed over in South Asian agricultural policy in favour of the major cereals rice and wheat and cash crops. These policies have had deleterious impacts on poor and marginal farmers, women and children, and indigenous groups in South Asia for whom small millets have long been an important and nutritious part of their diets and an important element in the agro-biodiversity that has provided their cropping systems resilience to the vagaries of climate, disease, and pests. The major objective of the action research in this project is to challenge this dominant policy orientation by pursuing a multi-pronged research strategy to raise the

profile of small millets. Through gender sensitive participatory approaches the project aims to increase production and daily consumption of nutritious small millets in Rainfed regions of India, Nepal and Sri Lanka. It focuses on overcoming existing constraints related to the production, distribution, and consumption of small millets. While the central methodology of the project is on

farm scientist-farmer collaborative research involving women and men, it also involves significant attention to post-harvest technological and product innovation, development of markets, and analysis of socio-economic, political, and policy opportunities and barriers to the enhancement of small millet farming in South Asia.