This paper provides summaries of presentations at a special session of IIFET 2012 that explored the potential value of a ‘wellbeing’ approach in small-scale fisheries, drawing on insights from the Governing Small-Scale Fisheries for Wellbeing and Resilience project. The research aimed to apply wellbeing concepts to both better understand fishery values and dynamics, and to improve fisheries management and governance. Wellbeing provides a framework to broaden the analysis of fisheries by addressing the three complementary elements of material, relational and subjective wellbeing, to properly consider the full range of values and objectives in fisheries, and to more comprehensively assess policy alternatives. The paper introduces the idea of wellbeing, then focuses on four themes: (1) the extent to which a wellbeing lens provides a more comprehensive way to approach concerns about poverty, livelihoods and vulnerability in small-scale fisheries; (2) how a wellbeing lens connects to a social-ecological systems perspective, and to analyses of resilience within a fisheries context; (3) how adoption of wellbeing perspectives can contribute to fishery governance thinking, and inform the implementation of fisheries management instruments, and (4) how a wellbeing lens can be applied in specific fisheries, through small-scale fishery case studies from South Africa.