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Two nations, eight states, the province of Ontario, two U.S. intertribal authorities, and the binational Great Lakes Fishery Commission all play a role in managing the Great Lakes fishery. No overarching institution has the authority to compel cross-border cooperation. Rather, the fishery agencies adhere to A Joint Strategic Plan for Management of Great Lakes Fisheries, a voluntary, multi-jurisdictional agreement signed in 1981. This article provides a brief overview of the roles and responsibilities of the management jurisdictions and describes how the Joint Strategic Plan helps agencies cooperate across jurisdictional boundaries. The plan relies on four strategies-consensus, accountability, information sharing, and ecosystem management-to foster cooperation, and to operationalize collective action on both lake and technical committees. The plan is a model for multi-jurisdictional cooperation in a politically fragmented region.

Fishery management is increasingly moving toward management that accounts for environmental and social dimensions. Such an approach requires the integration of natural and social science information into planning and decision-making processes. The actual integration of social science information, however, remains limited in many policy and decision-making processes within fisheries. Our study provides insights into factors that influence the intention to use social science information among fishery managers and the actual integration of such information into fishery management. Based on interviews with fishery managers in the Great Lakes, we find that the lack of social science expertise in fishery management agencies leads to multiple negative beliefs and attitudes, and subsequently a low intention to use social science information in decision-making processes. At the same time, the paper finds that more expertise in decision-making tools and basing social science on equal footing with natural sciences within fishery management institutions appears critical to advance the actual integration of social science information in fishery management.

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