The Fishery Performance Indicators: A Management Tool for Triple Bottom Line Outcomes

Abstract

Pursuit of the triple bottom line of economic, community and ecological sustainability has increased the complexity of fishery management; fisheries assessments require new types of data and analysis to guide science-based policy in addition to traditional biological information and modeling. We introduce the Fishery Performance Indicators (FPIs), a broadly applicable and flexible tool for assessing performance in individual fisheries, and for establishing cross-sectional links between enabling conditions, management strategies and triple bottom line outcomes. Conceptually separating measures of performance, the FPIs use 68 individual outcome metrics—coded on a 1 to 5 scale based on expert assessment to facilitate application to data poor fisheries and sectors—that can be partitioned into sector-based or triple-bottom-line sustainability-based interpretative indicators. Variation among outcomes is explained with 54 similarly structured metrics of inputs, management approaches and enabling conditions. Using 61 initial fishery case studies drawn from industrial and developing countries around the world, we demonstrate the inferential importance of tracking economic and community outcomes, in addition to resource status.

A Social Wellbeing in Fisheries Tool (SWIFT) to Help Improve Fisheries Performance

“…Reducing local employment by processing fish in another country may affect local wellbeing indirectly as well as directly, by reducing the tax base and, therefore, reducing political leverage for needed social services. Anderson et al's measures of nonresident employment follow a similar rationale [24]. We found no common data source for outsourced or migrant labor for fisheries (2.1 and 2.2).…”

“…However, data from these opportunities will likely not be available to most fisheries in the short term. On the other hand, the Anderson group [24] have created 68 metrics which can be ranked using key informants (rather than on-site field research) and, thus, potentially reduce the burden in uncovering suitable evidence. In this approach rankings are verified through further research if the evaluators find anomalies.…”

“…In some fisheries, information is so scarce that information from a single area and tens of fishers may be applied to a fishery that spans a whole country and many thousands of fishers and processing workers. Personal biases of key informants can also come into play in the Anderson group's approach [24] because it is unclear whether site-, region-, or country-level data has been used to arrive at a rank. Resolving this problem is beyond the scope of this paper, but this still is important to consider.…”

Sustainability and Environmental Sociology: Putting the Economy in its Place and Moving Toward an Integrative Socio-Ecology

“…In fact, it is argued that these three pillars serve as the foundation upon which sustainable development must be built, providing the outline for achieving what Andres Edwards calls a "sustainability revolution" [38]. Numerous researchers have employed variants of these models that sometimes include other factors (e.g., climate, fresh water, fisheries) depending on the focus and scope of the particular questions and problems [45,46].…”

Business Sustainability: How Does Tourism Compare?

“…However, the notion of sustainability metrics to assess initiatives or approaches presents another challenge. An abundance of literature exists in this area, with an array of sustainability models and indicators existing across many industries and business contexts [16][17][18]. Currently, there is no agreed-upon set of indicators to measure sustainability across the triple bottom line.…”