Small-scale fisheries account for most of the worldwide landings and employment. However, they are difficult to manage scientifically because the program of research and management applied to the relatively few large-scale fisheries is too onerous to be expanded to the myriad small-scale fisheries. Does this mean that SSF have a higher risk of overfishing so it would be necessary to implement more aggressively conservative measures to preemptively avoid collapse? Implementation of a stock assessment methodology developed for data-poor fisheries reveals that this may not be the case. We show that in the absence of formal stock assessment and enforcement of catch limits, Chilean small-scale fishers first apply excessive exploitation causing depletion then they eventually re-build their stocks supported by a process of co-management. We analyze three small-scale fisheries in central-south Chile: the striped clam Ameghinomya antiqua fishery in the Bay of Ancud, the razor clam Ensis macha fishery in the Gulf of Arauco, and the red octopus Enteroctopus megalocyathus fishery in the inner sea of Chiloé. We find that in the oldest fishery, for the striped clam, fishers are slowly re-building the stock from a very depressed condition, in the younger fishery for the razor clam they are recovering the stock and are close to re-building to the BMSY, and in the youngest fishery, for the red octopus, they have just shrank biomass to below BMSY. We observe that the best managed case, the fishery for the razor clam, is connected to a more mature co-management process, with fishers collaborating with government through committees of participatory management, which have provided a framework to co-manage for sustainability.