Managing Small-Scale Fisheries: Alternative directions and methods

This report describes and evaluates the impact of the major changes in the management of Canada's marine fisheries in recent decades. The report covers the historical and jurisdictional context; biological and economic aspects; objectives of fisheries management; techniques of resources management in general and those used for specific species; managing the common property through allocation of access, limited entry licensing, and individual quotas; the international dimension; the social dimension; habitat management; fisheries enforcement; and fisheries management in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Iceland, and the European Community.

During the last decade, there has been a shift in the governance and management of fisheries to a broaderapproach that recognizes the participation of fishers, local stewardship, and shared decision-making.Through this process, fishers are empowered to become active members of the management team,balancing rights and responsibilities, and working in partnership with government. This approach iscalled co-management.This handbook describes the process of community-based co-management from its beginning, throughimplementation, to turnover to the community. It provides ideas, methods, techniques, activities, checklists,examples, questions and indicators for the planning and implementing of a process of community-basedco-management. It focuses on small-scale fisheries (freshwater, floodplain, estuarine, or marine) indeveloping countries, but is also relevant to small-scale fisheries in developed countries and to themanagement of other coastal resources (such as coral reefs, mangroves, sea grass, and wetlands). Thishandbook will be of significant interest to resource managers, practitioners, academics and students ofsmall-scale fisheries.

The Newfoundland and Labrador cod fishery was once the most successful commercial fishery in the world. When it collapsed in 1992, many pointed to failures in management, such as uncontrolled harvesting, as likely culprits. Managed Annihilation makes the case that the idea of natural resource management itself was the problem. The collapse occurred when the fisheries were state-managed and still, two decades later, there is no recovery in sight. Although the collapse raised doubts among policy-makers about their ability to understand and control nature, their ultimate goal of control through management has not wavered and has been transferred from wild fish to fishermen and farmed cod.

This report indicates that climate change will significantly affect the availability and trade of fish products, especially for those countries most dependent on the sector, and calls for effective adaptation and mitigation actions encompassing food production.

Judged by a dismaying track record and a consequent downturn in the reputation of fisheries scientists, fisheries management is certainly a candidate for calls for reinvention, with many of the world leaders in this area holding the view that no fishery has ever been properly understood or managed. With fisheries science in a state of flux, this extremely important book seeks a new paradigm that will place this flux of ideas in perspective and help us to choose those that will make fisheries management work. The book was planned at a symposium of over 100 fishery researchers at the Fisheries Centre, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada and is organized into five parts: Why does Fisheries Science Need Reinventing?; New Policies; The Role of the Social Sciences; Ecology; Modelling. Carefully integrated and edited by three of the world's leading fishery scientists, this stimulating book should find a place on the shelves of all fishery scientists throughout the world. It will be an invaluable reference source to those studying fish biology, fisheries and oceanography and all those involved in fisheries policy decisions in government and university research establishments.