Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>The livelihoods of fishing communities are entangled with global socio-environmental challenges such as climate change, declining fishing stocks, and ocean pollution. While these problems are global, they have heterogeneous local materializations that require interventions attuned to local contexts. This chapter discusses the struggles of three Brazilian artisanal fishing communities that live in distinct socio-environmental contexts, and their relations with transdisciplinary projects that highlight the importance of interventions aligned to local circumstances and expertise. While outlining a transdisciplinary approach that emphasizes bottom-up collaboration with local communities instead of top-down environmental governance, this chapter also points out the connections between local struggles that require coordinated action at regional, national, and international scales. Navigating between local and global challenges leads to a perspective of ‘multi-level governance’ that emphasizes the agency of communities while connecting contexts through mutual learning and through social movements that challenge external drivers of local struggles.</jats:p>