Painting the floor with a hammer: Technical fixes in fisheries management

Fisheries management benefits from the contribution of several academic disciplines, each with their own perspectives, concerns and solutions. In this essay we argue that the contribution of biology, economics, sociology and other relevant disciplines to fisheries would be improved if they originated from broader, more integrated analytical perspectives that are attuned to the empirical realities of fisheries management. Today, disciplinary boundaries narrow the perspectives of fisheries management, creating tunnel vision and standardized technical fixes to complex and diverse management problems. Having worked separately and together for a number of years in fisheries research and consultancy in many parts of the world we, as a group of biologists, economists and sociologists, feel that the time to rid ourselves from disciplinary dogmatism is long overdue. We claim that improvements in fisheries management will be realized not through the promotion of technical fixes but instead by embracing and responding to the complexity of the management problem.     

Local ecological knowledge and practical fisheries management in the tropics: A policy brief

This policy brief is a summary product of seven case studies examining the integration of local ecological knowledge in fisheries management. Each case began with a series of in-depth interviews with local fishers, after which their answers were examined using both social and biological approaches to assess the possibility of using the information as the basis of simple, valid and locally acceptable indictors for fisheries management. We found that allocation and knowledge issues are closely interlinked and must be addressed in concert, and that the negotiation of shared understandings between multiple sources of knowledge must be a continuous process within an adaptive framework rather than a question of identifying a fixed set of indicators.     

Spatial planning on the North Sea: A case of cross-scale linkages

The North Sea Regional Advisory Council (NSRAC) is the main forum through which fisheries interests are involved in Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) on the North Sea. The NSRAC is a relatively new and fragile forum involving various stakeholders. MSP confronts this group with a series of broader issues such as inter alia wind farms, transportation, and marine protected areas. The spatial focus involves both a reduction and a multiplication of the levels of geographical scale at which information for management must be resolved. The ongoing development of these institutions provides lessons about facilitating the evolution of cross-scale institutional linkages that strengthen adaptive, eco-system-based management.