Maritime issues in North-East Asia: Their impact on regional politics

The author provides an introduction to the politics of the North-east Asia region, a survey of local maritime issues and disputes, and examines the impact of the new ocean regime on this region. He concludes that, although there are many substantial maritime disputes in North-east Asia, these are in general subordinated to larger determinants of political relations, and do not themselves have a major impact on regional politics. Soviet—Japanese relations, however, constitute an exception to this rule. Dr Buzan argues that the disputes over fishing and the northern islands played a key role in impeding better Soviet-Japanese relations, and thereby facilitated the current Sino — Japanese rapprochement with its potentially global implications.     

The regional development and management of fisheries: The UK case

The basic structure of the fishing industry in the United Kingdom is outlined, followed by a discussion focusing on six stages of development from the industrial revolution to the present. The industrial focus is evaluated with regard to the catching and shore sides of the industry respectively. The management system is discussed in terms of stakeholder groups, the fisheries resource and marine ecosystem, and regional management. It is concluded that a regional management system closely adjusted to the regional geography of the industry will be most effective.     

Generating the evidence for marine fisheries policy and management

The uptake of research in marine fisheries management and policy making depends on how effectively fisheries managers, researchers and scientific advisers communicate the needs for evidence, and the results and policy implications of research. The MariFish network of the major European funders of marine fisheries has therefore undertaken a study of current practices relating to communication of research needs and results, identifying strengths and weaknesses, and consequently how two-way communications, and hence the effectiveness of generating evidence for marine fisheries policy making and management, can be improved. Conclusions and recommendations for ‘good practice’ include the importance of building good relationships and trust between researchers and fisheries managers, the need for fisheries ministries to have sufficient inhouse scientific capacity to act as ‘intelligent customers’, and the key role of interpreters of research whose skills and career paths need to be carefully developed.     

A cautious fisheries management policy in South Africa: the fisheries for rock lobster

In South Africa, political emancipation has resulted in a new fisheries policy which is embodied in the Marine Living Resources Act of 1998. The pillars of the new policy are sustainability, equity and stability within the industry. We look particularly at a suite of mainly accessible species, the rock lobsters (truly spiny lobsters), at their management, at control measures, at realities of resource status and harvesting, at naturally occurring ecosystem stimuli, and investigate whether the policy can achieve what it aims to do, to provide more for more South Africans at levels at least equal to what they do today. Put simply, are the political aims and the sustainability aims of the new policy mutually achievable?     

WTO fisheries subsidies negotiations: implications for fisheries access arrangements and sustainable management

The paper considers the WTO negotiations on fisheries subsidies and the implications that envisaged disciplines will have on coastal developing countries. This is considered in relation to fisheries access agreements in the Central and Western Pacific where several least developed but resource rich island states such as Kiribati and Tuvalu are highly exposed to the risks associated with new WTO fisheries subsidies disciplines that do not consider their particular vulnerabilities. The paper considers some of the issues that coastal developing countries should incorporate into their emerging negotiating positions at the WTO. State-to-Sate fisheries access agreements which are often highly subsidised but where fishing vessel owners pay the equivalent of lump sum tax are paradoxically, the least distortionary and damaging to the environment. Strategies for managing the possible new disciplines are considered.     

The discard ban policy,economic trends and opportunities for the Portuguese fisheries sector

In this paper the discard ban policy within the Portuguese fisheries sector is discussed and the opportunities and impact in the fisheries economy that arise from sales of unwanted fish under the new landing obligation are evaluated. The decadal mean price of fish (€/kg, adjusted for inflation) rose from the 1940s until the 1970s, dropping thereafter. The yearly averaged economic income estimated for discards sales between 1969 and 2009 ranged from 419345€ to 2164379€. Discard ban sales could contribute from 10% to 53% of the total landed value and 9–34% of the total catches (landings + discards). Under a discard ban policy, the fishing sector with the largest economic contribution for total discards sales would be multispecies (54%), followed by trawl (26%) and seine (20%). On average, fishing sales contributed with 0.63% to gross domestic production (GDP) between 1938 and 2009. Discard sales can increase 1.07–1.46 times more than the fish landing contribution to GDP. After 1983 the average landings/imports economic ratio was 0.28:1, which means that fish imports surpassed landings economic value 3.57 fold. The discard ban policy can create economic opportunities in the national context thus helping to revitalize some specific fisheries sectors.     

Wealth-based fisheries management and resource rent capture: An application to the Maldives marine fisheries

The economic value of marine fisheries can be measured by the resource rent that may potentially be earned, which represents a flow of real wealth for the community at large. For the island state of the Maldives we estimate that the resource rent that could be generated by the marine fisheries is in the order of $50 million per annum, constituting some 27% of the current value of landings. This rent is lost due to the de facto open-access nature of fishing. A wealth-based approach to fisheries management would seek to capture the rent, and the paper discusses the constraints and trade-offs that would be faced in applying this in the Maldivian context. We argue that such an approach is entirely consistent with the aim of the 7th National Development Plan which rightly emphasises the need to ensure the sustainability of marine resources for present and future generations.     

Current and future trends in fisheries stock assessment and management

There are currently three dominant approaches to fisheries stock assessment: analysis of catch-at-age data; simple models of biomass dynamics (often called surplus production models) that rely only on catch and some index of abundance; and analysis of length frequency data. A key characteristic of all these methods is that they rely primarily on one type of data and ignore most of what is known about the biology of the species in question and what has been learned from fisheries elsewhere. Other information is sometimes included subjectively after the stock assessment is complete. The first major trend in assessment methods is developing ways of incorporating all that is known about the biology of a species into a single unified assessment procedure. The second major development is in methods of incorporating uncertainty in stock assessment, using statistical decision theory. At present few agencies have formal methods for treating the uncertainty inherent in stock assessment, and therefore uncertainty is often ignored. A number of trends in fisheries management are reviewed, including adoption of formal harvest strategies, recognition that fisheries management is a matter of decision-making and risk-taking, and the use of Monte-Carlo evaluation of fisheries management options. Future trends in stock assessment and management will likely include more attention to the behaviour of fishermen in response to regulations, more involvement of user-groups in decision-making, much more allocation of property rights, including complete privatization of some fisheries, and demand for evaluation of cost effectiveness of research and management activities. Threats to commercial fisheries as now known are discussed, including growing allocation to recreational and aboriginal users, environmentalists and the impact of aquaculture.     

Fish wars: Conflict and collaboration in fisheries management in Southeast Asia

As a result of declining and overfished small-scale nearshore fisheries in Southeast Asia, there are increasing conflicts and social tensions between and among different user groups, leading to coastal “fish wars”. A challenge facing fishers, resource managers and national decision makers in the region is to identify more appropriate governance and public policy mechanisms to manage conflicts over fishery resources and to resolve them productively in the interests of both long-term sustainability and short-term economic feasibility. A quantitative analysis undertaken in selected coastal communities in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam with and without co-management indicate that co-management does lead to reduced resource conflict levels. The analysis has also shown that when resource conflicts are reduced, food security improves.     

Evaluating the basic elements of transparency of regional fisheries management organizations

This paper reports on the first global study of regional fisheries management organization (RFMO) transparency. It was prompted by recent scholarship that suggests that RFMOs are failing to meet their conservation and management mandates and that transparency is a critical element of this performance. In this study, 11 RFMOs were evaluated using 34 questions, divided into three sections: (i) access to full, up-to-date and accurate information; (ii) public participation in decision-making; and (iii) access to outcomes. Secretariats for all 11 RFMOs were contacted, and all responded, to correct and comment on initial findings and to share additional information. The total scores in this study reflect transparency as measured against current good practices in RFMOs as a whole, rather than some sort of idealistic benchmark. Each question should therefore be seen as a diagnostic tool that shows where some RFMO(s) fall short and how they can correct the shortfall based on the practices of their peers. These results have highlighted a number of good practices amongst RFMOs, with no single RFMO standing out as having particularly poor transparency practices. On the other hand, there also were not any RFMOs that had exemplary transparency practices in every respect and all RFMOs still have room to improve upon their basic transparency practices. This first transparency assessment is necessarily broad in nature and considers only very basic elements of transparency. It is to be expected that as RFMO practices become more sophisticated, so will the techniques and criteria of future transparency assessments.     

A comparison of fisheries policy and management in the European Community and Eastern Canada

The fisheries systems which have developed in the European Economic Community (EEC) and Eastern Canada show striking similarities and contrasts. Both show efforts directed at conserving the resource base while setting limits for annual catches and allocating shares in these catches among fishermen. Canada has had less pressure on its resources and has been more successful in restraining over-fishing tendencies; it also has a more fully co-ordinated and effective management system. On the other hand the EEC has greater efficiency in catching, marketing and processing, and in recent times has had less government aid. Better systems would combine Canadian management efficiency with EEC economic efficiency.     

The context of policy design for existing community-based fisheries management systems in the Pacific Islands

Community-based fisheries management is being widely promoted as an alternative to centralized systems based on the familiar bioeconomic models that have manifestly failed to prevent a near catastrophic overexploitation of fish stocks worldwide. The Pacific Island Region probably contains the world’s greatest concentration of still-functioning traditional community-based systems for managing coastal-marine fisheries and other resources.It has been frequently asserted that many such traditional systems provide both a firm foundation for future coastal fisheries management in the Pacific Islands Region, as well as a conceptual framework for managing fisheries elsewhere. Although now seemingly self-evident to fisheries development “experts”, such assertions remain largely unverified.Whereas it is a relatively straightforward task to distil basic “design principles” from a sample of systems, it is far more complex to analyze the multi-sectoral national environment in which they function, especially when their history is taken into account. In other words, it is far less widely appreciated that many contemporary community-based fisheries management systems are the end products of a long process of change and adaptation to external pressures and constraints.In this article I address some of the broader contextual issues that should be appreciated in policymaking with respect to a potential modern role for traditional management systems in general, and in the analysis of a future role for any given system. First, the principal external factors that have caused change in systems are described and exemplified. The recognition of the potential role of existing community-based fisheries systems, and attempts to act on it, is summarized for some Pacific Island nations, with a focus on the complex problem of reconciling customary and statutory legal systems. In the final section I examine three principal national policy alternatives regarding the potential role of existing local fisheries management systems, together with three main criteria for determining whether or not a system can be adapted to fulfill modern requirements.     

Long-term trends in the structure of eastern Adriatic littoral fish assemblages: Consequences for fisheries management

Long-term interannual changes in abundance, biomass, diversity and structure of littoral fish assemblages were examined between 1993 and 2009 by experimental trammel net fishing up to six times per year, within the warm period - May to September, at multiple areas along the eastern Adriatic coast with the aim of testing for the consistency of patterns of change across a large spatial scale (∼600 km). The results revealed spatially consistent increasing trends of total fish abundance and biomass growing at an average rate of 15 and 14% per year, respectively. Of the diversity indices analysed, the same pattern of variability was observed for Shannon diversity, while Pielou evenness and average taxonomic distinctness measures Δ^∗ and Δ⁺ showed spatial variability with no obvious temporal trends. Multivariate fish assemblage structure underwent a directional change displaying a similar pattern through time for all the areas. The structural change in fish assemblages generally involved most of the species present in trammel net catches. A large pool of fish species responsible for producing the temporal pattern of assemblage change was relatively different in each of the areas reflecting a large geographic range covered by the study. An analysis of 4 fish species (Symphodus tinca, Pagellus erythrinus, Mullus surmuletus, Scorpaena porcus) common to each of the study areas as the ones driving the temporal change indicated that there were clear increasing trends of their mean catches across the years at all the study areas. A common pattern among time trajectories across the spatial scale studied implies that the factor affecting the littoral fish assemblages is not localised but regional in nature. As an underlying factor having the potential to induce such widespread and consistent improvements in littoral fish assemblages, a more restrictive artisanal fishery management that has progressively been put in place during the study period, is suggested and discussed.     

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.     

Putting the principles of the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach into fisheries development policy and practice

The Sustainable Livelihoods Approach (SLA) combines a conceptual framework with a set of operational principles to provide guidance on policy formulation and development practice. The SLA has been widely used in coastal and fisheries development research and has informed the design of development programmes but experience of operationalising it remains largely undocumented. In the Sustainable Fisheries Livelihoods Programme, which involves 25 West African countries, the SLA has helped to align fisheries policy with wider poverty reduction initiatives and to identify means of contributing to poverty reduction that do not directly increase pressure on fully or over-exploited fish resources.     

An indicator-based adaptive management framework and its development for data-limited fisheries in Belize

Decisions regarding the selection and implementation of management strategies that constrain fishing pressure can be among the most difficult choices that fisheries managers and stakeholders must make. These types of decisions often need to be confronted in a data-limited context, where few if any management measures are currently in place or fisheries are managed independent of adequate scientific advice. This situation can sometimes create a high risk of overfishing and potential loss of economic and social benefits. To address this situation, simple model-free indicator-based frameworks have the potential to be effective decision-making platforms for fisheries where quantitative estimates of biomass and fishing mortality based reference points are lacking. In this paper, a multi-indicator framework is developed that enables decision-makers to proceed with management decisions in data-limited situations. Model-free indicators are calculated using trends in observed data, rather than stock assessment derived estimates of biomass and fishing mortality. The framework developed is adaptive so that adjustments to catch or effort are recursive and can respond to changing environments, socioeconomic conditions, and fishing practices. Using stakeholder-defined objectives as a foundation, indicators and reference points of fishery performance are chosen that can be evaluated easily by undertaking analyses of available data. Indicators from multiple data streams are used so that uncertainty in one indicator can be hedged through careful interpretation and corroboration of information from alternative indicators. During the adaptive management cycle, managers and stakeholders evaluate each indicator against the associated reference points to determine performance measures, interpret the results using scientific and local knowledge, and adjust fishery management tactics accordingly using pre-defined harvest control rules. The framework facilitates the interpretation of situations in which performance measures suggest divergent stock abundance or productivity levels. A case study is presented on this framework's development for conch and lobster fisheries of Belize.     

The FAO guidelines for the development and use of indicators for sustainable development of marine capture fisheries and an Australian example of their application

Guidelines for developing and implementing sustainability indicators for marine capture fisheries were drafted during a recent expert consultation jointly organised by Australia and FAO in Sydney (Australia). This paper provides an overview of the guidelines and illustrates their application with an Australian example. As a background to the guidelines, the concept of sustainable development (SD) for marine capture fisheries was discussed and an agreed set of definitions and usage of common terms developed. The guidelines then outline the five sequential steps that need to be addressed in developing a meaningful set of indicators in the context of a Sustainable Development Reference System (SDRS). The five steps are:

• 1.specifying the scope of the SDRS;
• 2.developing a framework to agree on components within the system;
• 3.specifying criteria, objectives, potential indicators and reference values;
• 4.choosing the set of indicators and reference values;
• 5.specifying the method of aggregation and visualisation.

These steps are further elaborated in terms of how to scope the SDRS, define the dimensions and hierarchical levels to be included in the system, set multiple objectives and link these to indicators and reference values (e.g. targets, thresholds and/or standards). The guidelines also provide some examples of possible indicators, criteria for selecting some indicators over others and present ways of aggregating and visualising the indicators so that progress towards achieving sustainable development can be communicated easily to decision-makers.     

Impacts of hegemony and shifts in dominance on marine capture fisheries

Catch data indicates that the world’s 25 largest marine capture fisheries have generally comprised some 40–50% of the total annual reported catch (1950–2012). From a game theory perspective, there is considerable diversity across these 25 fisheries, both in terms of the number of players and the management paradigms. Here, a dominance-oriented classification system is proposed, according to which fisheries are categorized into: (1) hegemonic systems with single-player dominance; (2) coupled systems with two-player dominance; (3) group systems with shared dominance; (4) systems with no dominant player. Among these categories, the fourth represents perhaps the greatest challenge to sustainable management, while also demonstrating the challenges of managing common pool marine ecosystem services in areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ). The survey and analysis highlights how hegemonic conditions tend to preclude the establishment of cooperative agreements irrespective of the number of players involved in the fishery. Shifts in dominance away from hegemony, as demonstrated most recently in the case of the highly migratory Pacific Saury, can open the door to greater cooperation. Movement of fish stocks and displacement of fishing activities, due for example to climate change, have the capacity to cause major shifts in dominance and, in some cases, destabilize existing cooperative mechanisms.