Implementation of SSF Guidelines: Towards the implementation of the Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-scale Fisheries in the context of Food Security and Poverty Eradication Any meaningful discussion of ssf today must include an understanding of its social and politi-cal development. In order to understand where small-scale fishing communities stand today, who their stakeholders are and how political forces of the past have shaped their present context, it is vitally important to understand the history of these communities. Following the Introduction in Section 1, a case study-based contextual analysis of social relations in the implementation of the ssf Guidelines in South Africa is presented in Section 2. This is an illustrative example of how his-tory shapes the ssf community, indicating that the strategies for the way forward must be informed by historical understanding. This section also discusses traditional fishing communities and their knowledge base from different parts of the world, exploring how traditional practices are used by communities in both internal governance and external engagement with fishing technology and a changing fishing environment and what the role and status of women is within ssf. Section 3 discusses the impact of external forces and the struggles to resist and/or adapt which are part of most of the studies under consideration. The capacity-building workshops on the ssf Guide-lines in Maharashtra, organised by the icsf during early 2016, outline several aspects of this. The issue of tenure rights and user rights came up repeatedly in these workshops, as did the issue of how the government engages with these rights. The workshops raised the questions of urbanisation and urban pressures from builders, industry and government regulation. If the impact of development is a significant factor affecting ssf communities, equally so is the impact of conservation and fisheries management. Four case studies from Central America highlight issues of rights of fishing communi¬ties related to marine conservation resources and fisheries management practices. In addition, the overarching impact of climate change on ssf practices and possibilities, is discussed with examples from four Indian fishing states. The possibility of external intervention measures, explored in several of the studies under consid¬eration, is also discussed in Section 3. State intervention through organisations such as Matsyafed (acronym for the Kerala State Cooperative Federation for Fisheries Development Ltd) in Kerala, India, is analysed. Struggles such as the legal fight before the National Green Tribunal, where ssf took on large public sector enterprises in India, are illustrative of the possibilities of joint and in¬formed resistance. The possibility of cooperative development for post-harvest is discussed. The roles of the state and of community organisations are also analysed. Section 4 considers the impact of external influences (environmental and climate change-related ef¬fects) on the SSF subsector, and illustrates how these impacts have introduced further uncertainties in the fisheries information base, not least to the lives, livelihoods, futures and prospects of ssf fishers. The final section attempts to set out some of the important learning for the community and com¬munity organisations, for the state, regulatory bodies and other stakeholders. The publication is available at: http://www.icsf.net/images/occasionalpapers/pdf/english/issue_159/159_Voluntary_guidelines_klar%203.pdf