Douglas Clyde Wilson

The Paradoxes of Transparency : Science and the Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries Management in Europe

The International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) is het centrale wetenschappelijke netwerk binnen de grote hoeveelheid van bureaucratieen die verantwoordelijk is voor Europas Common Fisheries Policy (CFP). De afgelopen 25 jaar lukte het ICES niet om de visquota te handhaven. Bovendien belemmerde het managementsysteem het werk van de betrokken onderzoekers. Nu is een bewustere aanpak met oog voor het ecosysteem een nieuwe uitdaging voor ICES. Wel rest nog de kwestie van besluitvorming in een situatie waarin bureaucratie, harde politiek en wetenschappelijke onzekerheid het onmogelijk maken om de individuele visquota te handhaven. ICES is begonnen met het adviseren van s werelds lastigste managementsysteem: dat van de visserij. The Paradoxes of Transparency is het resultaat van uitgebreid sociologisch onderzoek naar ICES. Wilson laat zien dat de organisatie nieuwe manieren vindt om een effectief wetenschappelijk advies te geven.

The effects of legal mandates on fisheries science deliberations: the case of Atlantic bluefish in the United States

This paper examines a scientific decision making process that was used as the basis of management decisions for Atlantic bluefish (Pomatomus saltator) in the United States. It is derived from a sociological case study of the use of scientific claims by both scientists and non-scientists in a debate over the management of this species along the US East Coast between 1996 and 1998. This paper focuses on how legal mandates, and responses to these mandates by management agencies, shaped the debate among fisheries scientists about the condition of the bluefish stock. It suggests that these mandates had a distorting effect that kept the scientists from making use of what they felt was their best scientific judgement. The paper also examines the difficulties encountered by the scientists in assigning an appropriate role to the precautionary principle.

Analyzing resilience with communicative systems theory an example from European fisheries

The present paper argues that our understanding of the resilience of social-ecological systems can be improved by considering “communicative resilience” based on Communicative Systems Theory, which focuses on communicative action oriented to achieving mutual understandings. It further argues that it is possible to theorise and analyse resilience within complex social-ecological systems from this communicative perspective in a way that is very different from, but complementary to, agent-based approaches focussed on incentives. The paper presents data from multispecies mixed fisheries in Europe to demonstrate that the implications of institutional rules for SES resilience can be understood and improved upon by examining how institutions help or hinder the development of mutual understandings.

Building bridges among scientists and fishermen with participatory action research

Fishermen often describe feeling alienated and ill-informed regarding the planning and decision making that accompanies fisheries management. Like scientists and resource managers, they are greatly concerned by changes in marine ecosystems, the effect this will have on the sustainability of livelihoods, and the knock-on effects to the communities they live in. In recent years, European fisheries management has encouraged participation and engagement to provide opportunities for managers, scientists and fishermen to work closely on the common problems they face. In successful participatory projects where sustainable changes in working practices have been achieved, the fishermen have been included as collaborating partners and are fully integrated in the design and implementation of field studies. Fishermen often have innovative ideas that can result in greater sustainability of ecosystems, but not the institutional support to implement them. Overcoming these barriers requires a better understanding of fishermens’ perception of the issues, and better integration of their knowledge into research. Our recent experience of trying to enable deeper and more systematic engagement among fishermen and scientists throughout Europe during the GAP programme (Bridging the gap between science, stakeholders and policy; see www.gap2.eu) reveals how complex incentives influence the roles that the research partners play. With reform of the Common Fisheries Policy imminent and the EuropeanCommission’s desire for stakeholders to play a leading role in managing fisheries, there is a need for establishing governance structures that enable stronger participation of stakeholders in research.

Scientific Knowledge and Participation in the Governance of Fisheries in the North Sea

The participatory mode of fisheries governance is based on effective communications that are able to bring together the viewpoints of many stakeholders so that management decisions can be generated. This chapter offers a discussion of the relationship between stakeholder participation as it is taking place on a European scale and the generation of formal scientific knowledge for the management of fish stocks under the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP). It examines the demersal stocks in the North Sea in particular. Stakeholder participation has been an important factor leading to demands for changes on the ways in which formal scientific advice is generated and communicated. The impacts on scientific deliberations of three such demands are examined: a) a demand that advice shift from the fish stock to the fishery as its basic unit of reference; b) a demand that advice not be open to different interpretation by the various stakeholders; and c) a demand that the results of existing technical fisheries management measures be examined when preparing advice. The chapter concludes that a flatter decision making hierarchy could make possible both a richer knowledge base and greater public support for management decisions.

The Community Development Tradition and Fisheries Co-Management

Fisheries co-management, like any powerful idea, has a history of both antecedent ideas and of practical successes and failures. Appreciating co-management means understanding its family history, where it came from and who its cousins are. This section of the book traces how co-management emerged from the main branches of its family tree: the participatory community development efforts that are its closest programmatic cousins and the disciplines of fisheries science, economics and social science that make up the knowledge base of fisheries management as a whole. This chapter examines participatory community development programmes and how ideas that significantly influence fisheries co-management today developed through the history of these efforts.

Institutional Differences among Marine Fisheries Scientists' Views of their Working Conditions, Discipline, and Fisheries Management

Abstract We surveyed 349 U.S. marine fisheries scientists to ask them about their working conditions, their opinions about the state of the discipline of fisheries science, and their views about fisheries management. Fisheries scientists were largely engaged in applied work, with only a fifth of them significantly engaged in pure research. Among scientists working in management agencies, state scientists were more directly and immediately involved in a wide range of management tasks than were scientists working for the National Marine Fisheries Service. Although their views of both disciplinary issues and fisheries management reflected the problems they confront in their day-to-day work, the degree of consensus found among fisheries scientists on many issues was quite high. For example, there was both strong and broad support for the precautionary approach to management. Some areas of systematic disagreement were found, however. Scientists working in management agencies were somewhat more positive about w...

Rights-Based Management and Participatory Governance in Southwest Nova Scotia

In the late 1980s the ground fish fishery in Atlantic Canada suffered a massive collapse. This collapse and some institutional factors, including a massive cut in the budget of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, led to a number of management innovations. The chapter focuses on the substantial expansion of both rights-based management and participatory governance and the ways these two changes interacted with one another. The most common form of rights-based management in Nova Scotia is ITQs. However, the smaller boats fishing with fixed gears are using community quotas instead. One community from this group, the one with the largest fishery, has developed an internal ITQ system to allocate its community quota and this approach has proven successful at mitigating some of the social costs of ITQs while retaining most of the economic benefits. Participatory governance in Nova Scotia also extends to some extent to the way scientific advice is developed and used. Overall, this process has improved social robustness, by reducing the feeling of industry of being ignored. It has also improved biological robustness, by increasing the feeling of ownership and responsibility for the resource and improving the commitment to scientific advice.

Conflict and Scale

The idea of fisheries co-management is that ‘communities’ and the ‘state’ should work together to manage fisheries. The role of this chapter is to introduce the section on co-management and multiple stakeholders. This section is about multiple and competing uses of the fisheries resources, in other words, about co-management’s relationship to existing and potential conflicts. This chapter, however, is about scale. The argument is that understanding fisheries co-management, or more specifically understanding the relationship between the state and the community in fisheries management, requires understanding the intersection of conflict and scale.

Chapter 13 Delivering complex scientific advice to multiple stakeholders

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the biological, economic, and social analyses undertaken in support of fisheries policy. The role of science is to contribute to the development of a knowledge base from which advice on appropriate management measures can be articulated. This process happens within a highly uncertain natural, social, and institutional environment. In autocratic systems, where management is imposed by professional government fisheries management agencies, fisheries scientists have only one group to communicate the results of their analyses to. In such cases, these fisheries managers often have an academic understanding of the fisheries science issues, and readily understand the results of the science. However, such institutions are relatively rare in fisheries internationally. Furthermore, the conditions for producing scientific knowledge within fisheries management are far from ideal. Consequently, effective communication of the results of the science is essential to ensure that the advice is given the appropriate consideration. Other stakeholders, who lack the methods and tools of science, face even greater challenges. This chapter discusses issues relating to developing a knowledge base and the communication of scientific advice are discussed. The chapter focuses on communication in a cooperative management situation in which all stakeholders need to understand the advice and where they may each have knowledge and perspectives of their own that can contribute to the knowledge base.