Unintended and perverse consequences of ignoring linkages in fisheries systems

The development of fisheries management strategies within institutions such as national governments, the EU, and ICES includes explicit or implicit decisions on longer term management objectives and performance criteria, on the relevant knowledge base for tactical management decisions, on decision rules regarding fisheries in the current or forthcoming fishing season, and on the implementation framework. These decisions, moreover, must be relevant to the characteristics of the fisheries and the stocks being exploited. The development of management strategies must be based, therefore, on an understanding of the overall fisheries system and linkages among its components. Based on recent examples in Europe and North America, we discuss how a failure to understand the linkages in the fisheries system may lead to management strategies that fail to achieve their objectives, and how an understanding of these linkages can inform the development of strategies that are more likely to achieve policy objectives

Improving communication from managers to fisheres in Europe and the US

Communication problems need to be solved if managers are to be more persuasive about the need for limitations on fishing, to protect and restore fish populations. The context is widespread scepticism about the effectiveness of management on both sides of the Atlantic. That scepticism is fuelled by assessment bias as seen in the case of the northern cod of Newfoundland, and by failure to take into account differences in perceptions of stock size and fishing mortality, differences in causal reasoning about fishing pressure and environmental factors influencing stock size; and differences in the capacity to read and understand the mostly graphic information that underlies and is often used to explain management decisions. This analysis is based on interviews and observations in the European Union and the northeastern USA

Moving beyond panaceas in fisheries governance

In fisheries management—as in environmental governance more generally—regulatory arrangements that are thought to be helpful in some contexts frequently become panaceas or, in other words, simple formulaic policy prescriptions believed to solve a given problem in a wide range of contexts, regardless of their actual consequences. When this happens, management is likely to fail, and negative side effects are common. We focus on the case of individual transferable quotas to explore the panacea mindset, a set of factors that promote the spread and persistence of panaceas. These include conceptual narratives that make easy answers like panaceas seem plausible, power disconnects that create vested interests in panaceas, and heuristics and biases that prevent people from accurately assessing panaceas. Analysts have suggested many approaches to avoiding panaceas, but most fail to conquer the underlying panacea mindset. Here, we suggest the codevelopment of an institutional diagnostics toolkit to distill the vast amount of information on fisheries governance into an easily accessible, open, on-line database of checklists, case studies, and related resources. Toolkits like this could be used in many governance settings to challenge users’ understandings of a policy’s impacts and help them develop solutions better tailored to their particular context. They would not replace the more comprehensive approaches found in the literature but would rather be an intermediate step away from the problem of panaceas

The emergence and outcomes of collective action: an institutional and ecosystem approach A emergência e os resultados da ação coletiva: uma abordagem institucional e ecossistêmica

Participation in collective action is frequently studied through a community-based analysis, with focus on the social features of the participants and on the ecological features of the managed system. This study addresses the importance of scaling down to household level to understand different individual incentives to collaborate (or not) as well as scaling up to the landscape level to evaluate the ecological outcome of the local forms of collective action. A study of a riparian community of 33 households in the Lower Amazon located between two distinct ecosystems -a privately owned upland forest and a communally owned floodplain- reveals that household-based analysis uncovers how heterogeneity within the community leads to different incentives for participation in the communal floodplain, while systemic analysis reveals that interconnection between the managed ecosystem and adjacent ecosystem influences the decisions to participate as well as the ecological outcomes of the collective actions.<br>A participação numa ação coletiva é estudada com freqüência por meio de uma análise baseada nas comunidades e enfocada nas características sociais dos participantes e nas características ecológicas do sistema manejado. Este estudo refere-se à importância de se limitar a análise ao nível das famílias para compreender os diferentes incentivos individuais que colaboram (ou não), assim como de se ampliar a análise ao nível da esfera territorial a fim de se avaliar o resultado ecológico das formas locais de ação coletiva. Um estudo feito numa comunidade costeira de 33 famílias na Baixa Amazonia situada entre dois ecosistemas diferentes -uma mata/floresta de propriedade privada situada em terras altas e uma planície pluvial pertencente a uma comunidade- revela que a análise baseada nas famílias mostra que a heterogeneidade dentro da comunidade conduz a diferentes incentivos para participar das atividades na planície pluvial. A análise sistêmica, no entanto, mostra que a interconexão entre o ecosistema manejado e o ecosistema adjacente influi nas decisões para participar assim como nos resultados das ações coletivas