Stakeholder participation is a fundamental component of many states' and local agencies' fisheries legislations worldwide. The European Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), as one example, increasingly adopted a holistic approach to managing marine living resources. An important component of such an ecosystem-based management approach is the consideration of knowledge, values, needs and social interactions of stakeholders in decision-making processes. However, despite that stakeholder participation is a widely used term, a great variety of definitions exist, which often cause misunderstanding. Stakeholder participation is often used as part of conducting research on stakeholders but not in the context of their participation in resource management. Here, we present the results of a comprehensive literature review on the topic stakeholder participation in coastal and marine fisheries. We identified 286 scientific publications in Web of Science of which 50 were relevant for our research questions. Publications were analysed regarding (i) definition of stakeholder participation, (ii) analysis of participating stakeholders, (iii) applied participatory methods and (iv) intention for participation. Stakeholder types addressed in the publications included, e.g. fishery (fishers and direct representatives, N = 48), politics (policymakers and managers, N = 31), science (N = 25) and environmental nongovernmental organizations (eNGOs, N = 24). In total, 24 publications labelled their studies as stakeholder participation, while stakeholders were only used as a study object. We conclude that improving science and the practice of including stakeholders in the management of coastal and marine fisheries requires definitions of who is considered a stakeholder and the form of participation applied.
Conference participation is an important part of academic practice and contributes to building scientific careers. Investigating demographic differences in conference participation may reveal factors contributing to the continued under-representation of women in marine and ocean science. To explore the gender and career stage dimensions of participation in an international marine science conference, preferences of presentation type (oral/poster) as well as acceptance and rejection decisions were investigated using 5-years of data (2015–2019) from an International Marine Science Conference. It was found that early career scientists were more likely to be women, while established scientists were more likely to be men. Although overall, gender did not show a significant effect on the decisions to “downgrade” requests for oral presentations to poster presentations, early career scientists were significantly more likely to be downgraded than established scientists. Given that more women were often early career scientists, more women than men had their presentations downgraded. Other indicators and evidence from conference prize-giving and recognition awards point to a gender gap remaining at senior levels, highlighting the need for further actions as well as monitoring and researching conference participation from a gender perspective.
Gillnets are one of the most common fishing gears globally and provide a fundamental contribution towards the income of millions of people as well as to the supply of protein. At the same time, bycatch from gillnet fisheries is one of the biggest threats to seabirds and marine mammals worldwide, because their habitats coincide spatially and temporally with gillnet fisheries. There has been research on technical solutions to unwanted bycatch, yet the social-science perspective is rather understudied. Little is known about fishers’ bycatch behaviour, which can be researched as a social practice. Against the background of Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory, this study used social sciences methods to analyse the bycatch practices of gillnet fishers in the German Baltic Sea. The results show that fishers normalize bycatch of seabirds as part of their fishing routine, while bycatch of marine mammals is experienced as a crisis. Underlying mechanisms for different bycatch practices are identified, and their meaning for management as well as further research questions are discussed. The perspective of normalizing and non-normalizing bycatch practices as well as fishers’ own mitigation strategies should be considered by fisheries management when addressing bycatch mitigation measures as they could be designed more effectively.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.