ICES Journal of Marine Science: Journal du Conseil Advance Access originally published online on May 15, 2007
ICES Journal of Marine Science: Journal du Conseil 2007 64(4):577-579; doi:10.1093/icesjms/fsm061
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Fisheries Management Strategies: an introduction by the Conveners
1 Department of Fisheries and Oceans, 200 Kent Street, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1A 0E6
2 Irish Marine Institute, Oranmore, Co. Galway, Ireland
tel: +1 613 990 0288; fax: +1 613 954 0807; e-mail: ricej{at}dfo-mpo.gc.ca
tel: +353 91 387200; E-mail: paul.connolly{at}marine.ie
"How will we navigate these times? The answer is together. We need each other differently now. We cannot hide behind our boundaries, or hold onto the belief that we can survive alone. We need each other to test our ideas, to share what we are learning, to help us see in new ways and listen to our stories".Margaret J. Wheatley (2006)
The 2006 ICES Symposium on Fisheries Management Strategies, appropriately held on the rim of the Atlantic Ocean in Galway from 27 to 30 June 2006, aimed to review and consolidate the experiences being accumulated in management reforms implemented in the face of collapsing stocks and overcapacity of fishing fleets. The symposium was hosted by the Marine Institute of Ireland, with additional sponsorship by the Department of Communications, Marine and Natural Resources, Ireland, and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Canada. The Scientific Steering Committee consisted of the conveners Paul Connolly (Ireland) and Jake Rice (Canada), plus Mike Armstrong (UK), Poul Degnbol (Denmark), Peter Shelton (Canada), Tony Smith (Australia), and Doug Wilson (Denmark), aided by guest editor Niels Daan. Local arrangements were coordinated by Paul Connolly, Geraldine Kane, Helen Boles, Michelle Cheeseman, and Niamh Slattery. Overall attendance of the symposium was 140, and as highlighted below, this represented a broad spectrum of scientists, managers, and other stakeholders from 23 countries in Europe and North America, plus South Africa and Australia. It also included registrants from the European Commission, the ICES Secretariat, and the Northeast Atlantic Fisheries Commission (NEAFC).
The primary objectives of the symposium were to:
- establish the scientific basis for Precautionary and Ecosystem Approaches and their application in ICES advice;
- evaluate the potential for new management regimes and strategies that are robust, cost-effective, and lead to sustainable use of fisheries resources; and
- identify how sound, credible, timely, peer-reviewed, and integrated scientific information and advice can be provided for fisheries management and the protection of the marine environment in response to requests from regulatory commissions, ICES member countries, and partner organizations.
Fisheries agencies worldwide have committed themselves to substantial reforms in management practices. New approaches being variously implemented include the precautionary approach, the ecosystem approach, adaptive management, and harvest control rules. The effective implementation of these reforms requires understanding of their roles within management strategies that attempt to respond to the overall fisheries system, i.e. the combined characteristics and interactions among the resource, science, management decision-making, and user-group behaviour. Examples of such strategies include area-based, input-based (e.g. effort control), or output-based (e.g. quota regulation) management, allocation of fishing rights, or combinations of these. They may be designed as top-down (command and control) or co-management and shared-stewardship strategies. However, before their implementation, management strategies need to be evaluated in terms of robustness in the face of many uncertainties surrounding both assessment and implementation. This requires extensive modelling and simulation. The modelling in turn creates the need for a much broader base of knowledge and information about the sources of uncertainty. From the resource side, evaluating the robustness of management strategies provides an avenue—and implies a need—to consider the ecosystem context of the fishery with regard to uncertainties about stock productivity and natural mortality, about future states of nature, and about the footprint of the fishery on marine ecosystems. From the fishery side, the evaluations require consideration of potential biases and inaccuracies in the data on fleet performance and stock dynamics, as well as of interactions among the fleets in an area. The inclusion of fleet behaviour in these evaluations represents perhaps the largest change in practice for the traditional fisheries science community, because collaborations with social scientists in economics, anthropology, sociology, and political science, and directly with the fishing industry and coastal community, are a core part of evaluating options for sustainable practices.
The symposium provided an opportunity to review the state of knowledge in all these areas; not just fish populations and the marine environment, but also the fisheries themselves, the social and economic dynamics of those participating in the fisheries, and the dynamics of those engaged in the governance of the fisheries. This diversity in themes was matched by the diversity of participants. Compared with typical fisheries and aquatic sciences meetings, Galway attracted experts from a much broader range of disciplines of the biological, physical, social, and economic sciences, and from an even broader range of roles of scientific adviser, manager, policy-maker, resource user, and environmental activist. Even the age diversity of the participants was broader than traditionally, whereas the sex ratio was atypically close to one. These features alone represented an encouraging signal of forthcoming changes in the resource management arena. So too was the high quality and diversity of the talks and posters, and of the extensive discussions throughout the week.
The presentations highlighted a major change in perspective in viewing the cycle from ICES work in assessment and advice through management actions to fishery responses. In the past, this process has been envisioned as an orderly and lawfully laid out sequence of steps carried out in a never-ending cycle:
- a fishery is monitored to provide the core information for assessing stock status;
- the assessment is used as the basis for scientific advice on a recommended harvest;
- the scientific advice is used as a basis for adjusting (or not) the management plan for the fishery;
- the management plan determines how the fishery will be conducted; and
- the fishery operates according to the management plan, and is monitored.
Once this new view was accepted as closer to the reality of any fishery system, several key messages emerging from the symposium about the management cycle included the following.
- Malfunctions at any point can affect the performance of the other parts;
- It is not possible to fix malfunctions in one place just by doing a better job in another part;
- One can and should try to make each step robust to plausible malfunctions in all other parts;
- One can and should involve participants in each step as sources of constructive input in both diagnosing and correcting shortcomings in all other steps. This means that all involved should stop using the shortcomings elsewhere as an excuse or a scapegoat for inadequacies in the system as a whole, or for one's own role; and
- The interdependence of all steps gives great value to a common information base for all participants, to ensure that dialogue on options and consequences starts from a common factual basis. This interdependence requires that all of us directly or indirectly involved surpass existing stereotypes, both positive and negative, about the capabilities and/or motivations of other participants in the entire management process.
Several looming issues also emerged, particularly in the comments during the concluding panel session. One is that, although many case histories presented addressed the development of management strategies for stocks and fisheries already in or near crisis, other stocks and fisheries not facing an imminent crisis may be healthy more through sheer luck than because science and management had foreseen all the risks and planned successfully to avoid them. More crises may be around the next corner, and awaiting a crisis before developing an appropriate management plan means a more difficult task of developing an effective recovery plan. We have no time to waste learning how to design, test, and implement robust and reliable management strategies for all fisheries, and perhaps we should not just concentrate on those few that keep grabbing the headlines.
A second looming issue is that the global biodiversity—conservation agenda is moving swiftly into marine ecosystems. If we don't fix the current problems of unsustainable fisheries relative to target species, the larger ecosystem, and dependent economies and communities quickly, new players with different perspectives and goals may seize control of much of the public dialogue, and possibly the decision-making.
Finally, several papers presented examples of collaborations between fisheries biologists and social scientists, examining fisheries where management was clearly failing, both from the perspectives of stock status and the economics of the fishery. These cases were characterized by contested science advice, a lack of commitment among fishers to measures imposed on them, and inadequate communication among the players. These issues are important, but several participants closest to the reality of decision-making in government emphasized that better science advice on stock dynamics and better economic analyses probably would not have prevented the failures. They argued that social justice is a key determinant of government choices. We do not know how to measure social justice in currencies that fit comfortably into our modelling of management strategies. Indeed, it is discomforting to learn that our best modelling efforts, which are already very complex, are still missing one of the key considerations in how fishery systems actually function.
Despite concerns about these looming issues, in our opinion and that of most participants, the symposium did meet its objectives and appeared to be considered a major step forward. In fact, a challenge was made to underscore what progress had really been made since the 1998 ICES Symposium on Confronting Uncertainty in the Evaluation and Implementation of Fisheries-Management Systems, held in Cape Town in December 1998, a symposium that consolidated the state of the art just eight years earlier. Put broadly, the key insight from the Cape Town symposium (Payne, 1999) was that successful fisheries management required many more jobs to be done than fisheries science had thought before, and noted that all involved should go back to their laboratories and offices, and get on with doing them. The additional insight from Galway is that successful fisheries management requires many more jobs to be done than fisheries science had assumed, but that the proper fora need to be created for all of us to get on with those together.
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Payne A. I. L., ed. Confronting uncertainty in the evaluation and implementation of fisheries-management systems. ICES Journal of Marine Science (1999) 56:795–1074.
Wheatley M. J. Leadership and New Science. (2006) 3rd edn. Berrett Koehler, San Francisco.
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