What does stakeholder involvement mean for fisheries management?

Abstract

ABSTRACT. The Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) sets the guidelines for the management of European fisheries. The CFP is revised every 10 years, and the last two revisions have laid the groundwork for extending stakeholder participation in European Union fisheries management. The fishery industry and nongovernmental organization (NGOs) especially are recommended to be given greater influence. In this paper we report results from an international survey on fisheries stakeholders' preferences for the three pillars of sustainable fisheries activities as defined in the CFP: ecological, economic, and social. Results of the survey show that industry member preferences were significantly different from the preferences of authorities, scientists, and NGOs. The preferences of the three latter groups did not vary significantly across stakeholder group. This raises the question of what consequences the planned stakeholder involvement in the CFP may have, given the preferences revealed in our survey.

Preference Modeling to Support Stakeholder Outreach toward the Common Fishery Policy Objectives in the North Mediterranean Sea

“…This result demonstrates the awareness of the key role of ecological objectives, as in Janssen et al (2014), and also reflects the common sense of fishermen, who generally consider the spawners as the more fragile component of the stock, which necessitates protection. This is quite different from the results of Aanesen et al (2014), who found a low interest of the industry in fostering ecological objectives.…”

“…Multi Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA; e.g., Belton and Stewart, 2002) is an area of growing interest in fisheries management, and there are several applications worldwide (e.g., Soma, 2003;Leung, 2006;Bevacqua et al, 2009;Innes and Pascoe, 2010;Aanesen et al, 2014;Kavadas et al, 2015;Rossetto et al, 2015). MCDA models are powerful for addressing specific problems characterized by multiple and often conflicting objectives, something that is common in fishery systems.…”

“…1380/2013 1 ) clearly places the role of stakeholders in a more interactive governance system, involving other actors besides scientists and policymakers. The Advisory Councils, established following the 2002 reform of the CFP, are currently the bodies where representatives from a broad set of stakeholders contribute to the decision-making process through a bottom-up approach (Aanesen et al, 2014).…”

Harvest Strategies for an Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries Management in Western Mediterranean Demersal Fisheries

“…The non-governmental organization (NGO) Oceana (oceana.org) published a report entitled Proposal for a responsible fishing in the Balearic Islands (Carreras and Cornax, 2011) in the form of five different leaflets including: (i) a global view of the local fisheries; (ii) recreational fisheries; (iii) small-scale fisheries; (iv) marine protected areas; and (v) bottom trawl fisheries. This material has also been analyzed and some proposals included in the RIP, which is therefore underpinned by the four main pillars of fisheries management (Aanesen et al, 2014;Röckmann et al, 2015): scientists, fishermen, policy-makers, and NGOs.…”

Decision Support to Sustainable Management of Bottom Trawl Fleet

“…Identification of stakeholders for their involvement in the management process is not a straightforward task. Several authors defined the main stakeholder groups for the fishery sector (e.g., [25,26]). In this case, the four main stakeholder groups were identified and invited to participate in the execution of the DSC SMBTF.…”