Building Blocks of Sustainability in Marine Fisheries Management. Stakeholders, objectives, and strategies

Abstract

Fisheries management, freshwater or marine, is found in virtually every country in the world. Fisheries management is the activity of organizing and controlling the extent of human exploitation of a single fish resource or combination of fish resources. Management can be as informal as communal social norms or as official as federally controlled departments or formal multi-national agreements. The overriding objective in modern fisheries management is sustainable exploitation. Although policy-makers and stakeholders can relatively agree with this objective, the means to the end are highly debatable and uncertain. Therefore, normative science is not able to correctly describe how sustainable exploitation should take form and a new postnormal science view is needed. Intricate system components of biology and socio-economy as well as political issues are parts of modern management. Although these system components are broad and farreaching, research in the realm of modern management tends to be specialized in single components (biological studies, economical studies or social studies) rather than through interdisciplinary work. Management success becomes more probable when the biological, economical, and sociological research is bridged through holistic system discussions and conclusions. This dissertation tackles some specific topics within marine fisheries management through four papers: a review of management case studies, modelling stakeholder utilities for consensus-building, theoretical aspects of harvest control rules, and finally, mapping biological, economic and employment consequences of a menu of management options resulting from use of different marine demersal trawls.