Causal Effects of Fisheries Management Aquatic Adaptation on Yield Stability in Uganda: A Difference-in-Differences Design

Uganda's fisheries sector faces mounting pressure from climatic variability, yet evidence on whether management adaptations stabilise yields remains largely associational. We argue that conventional before-after evaluations conflate adaptation effects with secular trends and shock-driven fluctuations, and we propose a staggered difference-in-differences design that exploits the phased rollout of management interventions across districts. The article formalises the identification assumptions, specifies a spatial weighting scheme for spillover between neighbouring water bodies, and articulates a composite spatial index of hydrological vulnerability to guide heterogeneity analysis. We do not report empirical estimates; rather, we provide a replicable protocol, including a geographic information systems workflow for constructing treatment exposure measures and outcome stability metrics. The design addresses a central tension in African fisheries governance: interventions are adopted precisely where yields are most volatile, making naive comparisons misleading. We conclude that credible causal inference requires pairing quasi-experimental methods with fine-grained spatial data on hydrological and institutional conditions, and we specify the conditions under which the proposed design would yield interpretable estimates.