Inland fisheries can provide a wide range of social benefits, many of which make important contributions to both household livelihoods and national economies. These benefits and how they are created and distributed, however, are essentially social phenomena, perceived, valued and utilized by people and the social and economic worlds in which they live. Despite this, fisheries are often framed in science and policy, at least initially as an ecological issue with the resource (fish) as the starting point for investigation and the basis for recommendations for action. This chapter considers the potential for and implications of reframing fisheries from a more people-centred (social–natural) perspective. The chapter starts by summarizing the range of benefits that are derived from inland fisheries systems around the world, highlighting the importance of these to households, communities and national economies. It goes on to explore some of the issues that have emerged from ecologically led management approaches and how these have served to highlight the importance of the social aspects in practice. The chapter then goes on to examine the implications of looking at fisheries as social–natural systems. While recognizing the fundamental importance of ecological dimensions of fisheries, the interest here is in considering the social dimensions as a critical point of entry for improving conceptual understanding, management practice and governance. For this purpose, we focus on three distinct social aspects: first, we consider the discourse of fisheries management, the ways in which problems and solutions of fisheries management are usually framed in the academic and policy-related literature. Second, we consider how institutions and agency shape the norms and rules of access, utilization and distribution and how these might be supported, contested or undermined. This will highlight how, in practice, these 'social' aspects of fisheries often determine outcomes of policy and practice, resulting in outcomes that may not have been expected at the outset. This is often as a result of the policy and/or management assumptions made about the ways that people will respond to policy and practice. The chapter concludes by considering what it might mean for the management of inland fisheries systems starting from a social–natural perspective and the different opportunities and pathways that this may identify. Furthermore, we conclude with thoughts how such an approach might broaden our understanding of the challenges of fisheries management and open up potential options for addressing such challenges.