A Social-Ecological System (SES) is formed when humans interact with their environment. Thus, an SES is an ecological system intricately linked with and affected by one or more social systems. Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) can be considered as vibrant SESs in which human societies and other organisms interact with the physical environments. Particularly human-fish interactions could also be considered as a SES and decisions for tuna fisheries management are mainly borne by after the analysis based on fish and fisheries data where hardly addressed information on SES. Therefore, present analysis was conducted for Sri Lankan tuna fisheries ushing the Driver-Pressure-State-Impact-Response (DPSIR) framework which was developed and used for the adaptive management of various SESs. “Driving forces” such as high dependency for fish, economies of the stake holders, climate change, urbanization and industrialization through the “pressures”; increased fishing effort, overexploitation, use of destructive gears, Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated fishing practices, changing oceanographic conditions to “state” of, depleted fish stocks and low fish production deviation of fish distribution and fishing grounds, and more warm pools and ‘impacts’ on declining catch, loss of early life stages, marine environment degradation and eventually leading to ‘responses’ of fisheries and environmental laws and regulations as well as novel technological applications. This showed that the important steps in the process where catch data analysis, could not support alone to support the system. Therefore, a comprehensive analysis using DPSIR is recommended to find out the facts for fisheries management both in terms of regional and national scales.