In March 2015, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the Government of the Kingdom of Cambodia co-organized: “Fishing & Tenure Rights 2015: A global forum on rights-based approaches for fisheries”.

Attended by 140 participants from a variety of fisheries-related disciplines and 38 countries, this forum was inspired by the FishRights 99 and Sharing the Fish ’06 conferences to broaden discussion beyond commercial/industrial fisheries and to include more fisheries stakeholders and types of fisheries.

UserRights 2015 brought participants together to share success stories and challenges in the process of designing and implementing appropriate rights-based systems for fisheries. Working group discussions focused on social, economic, environmental, governance and legal aspects of rights-based approaches as well as on (re)distributional and gender impacts on all stakeholders directly and indirectly dependent on fisheries resources. As a result of UserRights 2015, FAO organized Entebbe 2016 for stakeholders to continue working together on finding holistic solutions in the sphere of tenure and fisheries.