 Roadmap provides the most up-to-date policy mandate for CBFM in Vanuatu, resulting from the increasing regional and domestic momentum behind CBFM.

Formative CBFM programmes and initiatives in Vanuatu
In their summary of CBFM-related initiatives prior to the mid-2010s, Raubani et al. (2017) identify seven influential initiatives that shaped coastal fisheries development in Vanuatu. In doing so, they elucidate the main drivers behind a rise in co-management, primarily through external bilateral funding. These trends show progression from early, predominantly direct interventions in fisheries towards multi-sectoral approaches that incorporated different stakeholders and targeted different levels of governance to achieve both local, immediate impact and structural, longer-term change.
Starting in the late 1980s, the first large scale community-based initiatives engaged through production-bolstering interventions which sought to develop local entrepreneurial capacity. The 'EU micro project', for example, provided equipment and technical skills and was the first concerted investment into community level fisheries (Raubani et al. 2017). Subsequent initiatives in the early 1990s recognised the need for simultaneous policy interventions. The first to make meaningful steps was a series of projects aimed towards trochus (Trochus niloticus) rehabilitation in coastal areas, which highlighted the importance not only of legislative tools to control harvest and legitimise management measures, but also the engagement of community stakeholders to enforce those (Amos 1993;Jimmy 1995). Subsequent programmes run by VFD drew from this approach, with further investments into, for example, developing national management plans for various species (2010 onwards), refinement of coastal fisheries regulations (2014 and 2016), and establishment of strategic planning tools like the coastal fisheries roadmap (2019).
By the end of the 1990s the Vanua Tai communitybased resource monitoring network was highly regarded amongst domestic stakeholders for its increasingly extensive reach within communities. By 2003, 100 coastal communities were represented in the network that included over 200 resource monitors (Johannes and Hickey 2004), and were forming partnerships with various government departments to implement programmes. In the process, many monitors voluntarily assumed additional roles, including, for example, as authorised fisheries officers. In doing so, these individuals embodied VFD's furthest governance reach into communities. As noted by Hickey (Vierros et al. 2010, p. 33) in his reflection on linkages between local, traditional, and national government resource management in Vanuatu, ''once the underlying rationale of fisheries regulations […] are understood […], community leaders are happy to include these in their village-based management regimes. This has boosted the importance and value of cooperative management principles''.
Not only was there an expansion in stakeholder engagement to lower-level civil society networks, but also upwards at a regional level. Multi-country funding initiatives for coastal fisheries saw significant investment distributed amongst the Melanesian countries and other Pacific countries. The International Waters Program (2000involving 14 PICTs), and the Mangrove Ecosystems for Climate Change Adaptation and Livelihoods (MESCAL; 2010-2015) were important regional investments, with national and local nodes in each country. Amongst other changes, these brought about increased marine conservation area designation, community capacity building, ecosystem management approaches, and climate change mitigation programmes in Vanuatu (Raubani et al. 2017). It also engaged Vanuatu in increasingly active regional-level discussions on coastal fisheries development after 2010, mostly through facilitation by what is now known as the Fisheries, Aquaculture, and Marine Ecosystems division at the Pacific Community (SPC-FAME). A regional coastal fisheries production monitoring programme, 'TAILS' (Pacific Community 2019) was, for example, piloted with SPC-FAME in 2016. It led to the rollout of data collection on tuna and reef fish catch from small-scale fishers in remote locations (Pacific Community 2019), of which later refinements produced a tailored Vanuatu version, 'TAILS?'.
Around 2010 Vanuatu also saw the start of its first longterm, continuous investments into coastal fisheries development. Whilst prior bilateral project funding for CBFM at VFD never exceeded about 10 million Vatu per year (* 87 500 USD), the following decade saw this increase to an estimated average annual investment through bilateral projects of over 40 million Vatu (* 350 500 USD). Three main investments have since been through several phases and are still operative today. The first being the Grace of Seas Program, supported through the Japan International Cooperation Agency, starting in 2008 and running until the present. The second being a string of smaller research for development projects under the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development, which provided technical management support to VFD around participatory fisheries area management. Finally, investments by the Australian Government, starting 2014 and continuing to the present.
As part of their shared mandate to strengthen co-management of coastal fisheries in Vanuatu, these initiatives helped establish collaborative partnerships between VFD and key coastal communities (Nimoho et al. 2016;Gereva et al. 2021). Under these participatory management programmes, CBFM's orientation at VFD also shifted from the previous environmental-focus to a more rural development-focus, where issues of income and livelihoods, food-security and empowerment gained equal importance as outcomes next to ecosystem performance indicators. At the same time, these programmes were increasingly shaped from one phase to the next by strengthened VFD. These bilateral partnerships further refined VFD's co-management approaches, to the point that CBFM has come to form the prime national implementation strategy for supporting communities and their coastal fisheries.

Examining CBFM growth through innovation pathways
Here we examine the coastal fisheries regime reconfiguration thus far in Vanuatu, by tracing the CBFM innovations trajectories across scaling phases. Our analysis indicates how CBFM as an innovation has developed through phases of experimentation, stabilisation, and disruption, so that Vanuatu finds itself at a critical time of transition towards institutionalisation of CBFM (Fig. 4).
Prior to the experimentation phase of CBFM, anthropological works of the early twentieth century (e.g. Malinowski 1922) laid the foundation for wider recognition of traditional management structures in Melanesia. Later works by, for example, Ruddle (1993Ruddle (, 1998, Johannes (1998Johannes (, 2002 and Hickey (2008) drew such insights into resource and fisheries management, and into the Vanuatu context of kastom. These academic perspectives materialised into practical forms of interventions in small pilot projects like the government-driven initiatives behind trochus rehabilitation (Amos 1993), the emergence of the Vanua-Tai resource monitoring network (Hickey and Johannes 2002) and later in the form of foreign aid funded research for development initiatives. As reported by Dumas et al. (2012, p. 1) in their national review of coastal area management effectiveness, Vanuatu experienced ''since the early 1990s a striking upsurge in small-scale initiatives to protect marine invertebrate resources […]. One of the most common actions was the creation of very small, village-based marine reserves (tabu areas) with permanent or temporary fishing bans for invertebrate species''. They make further reference to 'booming' of smaller community-based management trials in Vanuatu in this period. These smaller experimental forays into co-management served as an important, somewhat crude, refining period where key principles of collaborative management, partnership building and cultural awareness, were first married with technical insights of fisheries management (Vacelet 2008).
By 2010 approaches to fisheries co-management were becoming more sophisticated and increasingly received mention in national policy and development discourse in Vanuatu (Léopold et al. 2013). The previously mentioned set of long-term investments into Vanuatu coastal fisheries by bilateral projects, formed the second generation of innovation-building that drove CBFM into a stabilising phase. Indicative of CBFM's expanded applications was its integration as part of disaster relief efforts. When Tropical Cyclone Pam struck in 2015 many coastal communities were affected. Human capital, collaborative networks, and community-based organisational capacity developed as part of CBFM projects proved valuable in increasing communities' ability to deal with those disruptions independently (see Eriksson et al. 2017 andPakoa et al. 2019 for examples of CBFM-related coping strategies that communities applied).
The stabilising phase of the 2010s was furthermore supported by a period of close collaboration with regional institutions like SPC-FAME. The former VFD director of 12 years was director of SPC-FAME from 2014 to 2019, and a cohort of ni-Vanuatu fisheries officers worked there at the time. The 'New Song for Coastal Fisheries in the  Steenbergen et al. (2022), using the dimensions of'scales of structuration' and 'phases of scaling' to sense-make the different innovation trajectories of CBFM that have contributed to a regime reconfiguration supporting institutionalisation of CBFM (we draw here from selected key literature related to CBFM in Vanuatu, including : Malinowski 1922;Johannes 1978Johannes, 1982Johannes, 1998Johannes, 2002Amos 1993;Ruddle 1993Ruddle, 1998Hickey and Johannes 2002;Vacelet 2008;Adams 2012;Léopold et al. 2013;Tavue et al. 2016;Eriksson et al. 2017;Raubani et al. 2017;Andrew et al. 2020;Sami et al. 2020;Gereva et al. 2021;Steenbergen et al. 2022) Pacific' found particular