Elsevier

Marine Policy

Volume 92, June 2018, Pages 73-85
Marine Policy

Stakeholder perceptions in fisheries management - Sectors with benthic impacts

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpol.2018.02.019Get rights and content

Highlights

  • CFP encourages stakeholder perceptions in fisheries management.

  • Actual implementation of benthic mitigation measures depends on stakeholder perceptions.

  • Stakeholder preferences vary across European regions and stakeholders.

  • Ensuring trust among different stakeholder groups is important through policy making.

  • A digitized tool could enhance future stakeholder engagement in fisheries management.

Abstract

The capture fishing sector causes direct and indirect impacts on benthic habitats and associated fauna and flora. Effectiveness of new mitigation measures depends on fishermen's perceptions; their acceptance of, and compliance to, those measures. Accordingly, by means of Advisory Councils (ACs), fisheries stakeholders are encouraged by the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) reform to contribute to policy formulations. Still, the CFP reform remains unclear about how to possibly incorporate perceptions of specific conservation measures and objectives in practice. Against this background, this article aims at exploring a systematic multi-criteria approach that provides information about stakeholder preferences for objectives reflecting on what is more important to aim for (‘what’), mitigation measures as strategies for reaching their objectives (‘how’), and accountability options that can enhance trust in the people who carry out management (‘who'). The approach applies a pairwise comparison approach to elucidate the stakeholder preferences, and to estimate the relative importance of the different options. It is conducted in the Black Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, the Baltic Sea, and the North Sea. The outcomes of the questionnaire survey succeed in transparently reflecting a diversity of preferences. It is advised that in order to inform the CFP, the ACs develop a user-friendly attractive online version of this approach that can reach multiple stakeholders across Europe and facilitate updates on a continuous basis. In this way the ACs could better facilitate bottom-up participation in fisheries management by representing a wide range of stakeholder perceptions.

Introduction

The mobile, bottom-contacting gears currently applied in the fishery sectors across Europe are increasingly criticised for having a large impact, both directly and indirectly on the benthic habitats and communities [1], [2], [3], [4]. Direct impacts entail direct change in population dynamic parameters such as mortality, growth, reproduction, distribution, density, and abundance patterns of target and bycatch fish and shellfish species as well as benthic invertebrate communities and habitats. Other direct impacts are physical impacts, i.e. abrasion, on the benthic habitats and their physical structures. Indirect impacts include derived changes in species or food web interactions, long term changes caused by changed water turbidity and sedimentation, e.g. long term influence on recruitment, nursery and feeding habitats, etc. Additionally, the indirect impacts involve discards in relation to changes in food web interactions in high discard areas caused by the fishery. In a study comparing beam trawlers with demersal otter trawlers, gillnet, and sandeel fisheries in the German Exclusive Economic Zone of the North Sea, it was estimated that risks for direct effects in terms of mortality and disturbance effects are highest per unit of surface area swept for beam trawlers [5]. More specifically, different gear footprints can be distinguished for individual gear components, such as beam shoes, tickler chains, trawl doors, sweeps, and ground gear [7]. In research conducted by Kaiser et al. [4] it has been found that the benthic impacts of trawling not only depend on gear characteristics, but also on the bottom habitat types. The bottom-types can consist of different types of sand, mud and/or coarse sediment habitats, which have different physical and biological capacities, characteristics and sensitivities to impacts.

The Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) reform encourages an ecosystem based approach, in which benefits from living aquatic resources are ensured ‘while the direct and indirect impacts of fishing operations on marine ecosystems are low and not detrimental to the future functioning, diversity and integrity of those ecosystems’ [8], [9], [10], [11]. Correspondingly, the CFP reform proposes a new general framework to manage EU fisheries, focusing on multiannual plans as a main tool to plan and define management goals for fish stocks, functioning as a roadmap for achieving sustainability objectives to preserve marine biological resources [8]. While the Member States have the ultimate responsibility for the formulation of plans (multiannual plans or discard plans), the Commission can draw up a plan if judging the plans of the Member State insufficient [10].

Previous lack of flexibility and adaptation at the EU level by means of top-down micro-management has been acknowledged in the reform of the CFP. Accordingly, the CFP reform stresses that to ensure good governance, appropriate involvement of stakeholders is needed to implement measures [8], [12]. Stakeholders of the fisheries now contribute through the regionally based Advisory Councils (ACs) to formulate policies, and fisheries administrations are more closely linked to the regional problems. Notably, recommendations and advice provided by the ACs have no legal status in terms of implementation, but are limited to advising Member States and the Commission [10], [13]. As such, the CFP reform remains unclear about how to involve stakeholder perceptions in fisheries management in practice.

Against this background, this article aims at exploring a systematic multi-criteria approach for identifying stakeholder perceptions concerning possible mitigation measures, sustainability objectives and accountability options in fisheries management, targeting sectors with benthic impacts. In particular, by means of a questionnaire survey conducted for the FP7 European project BENTHIS,1 the intention is to identify stakeholder preferences of fishermen, fisher representatives, other private companies, civil society, government, science, and others, across four regions of Europe including; the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, the Baltic Sea and the North Sea. The importance of consulting with stakeholders is enhanced with this article, in accordance with one of the core intentions of BENTHIS, which is to: “develop in consultation with the fishing industry and other stakeholders on a regional scale, sustainable management plans that reduce the impact of fishing and quantify its ecological and socio-economic consequences”.

This article first introduces the systematic multi-criteria approach on how to conduct stakeholder surveys in Section 2, and follows up with presenting identified options for mitigating benthic impacts of fisheries in Section 3. The results of stakeholder preferences identified in the four regions are presented in Section 4. In Section 5 the results are discussed, followed by concluding remarks in Section 6.

Section snippets

Methodological approach

Stakeholder perceptions in fisheries management can be shaped through at least three different channels; (1) preferences for objectives reflecting on what is more important to aim for (‘what’), (2) preferences for mitigation measures as strategies for reaching their objectives (‘how’), and (3) trust in the people who carry out management (‘who'). In other words, stakeholder perceptions in fisheries management not only refer to ‘what’ they prefer, but also to ways in which mitigation measures

Options for mitigating benthic impacts of fisheries

The questionnaire survey consists of a total of three main sections, including identified options for sustainability objectives, measures and accountability options for mitigating benthic impacts of fisheries.

The identified stakeholder preferences

In this section the outcomes of the questionnaire survey exploring stakeholder perceptions in fisheries management are presented. The core outcomes of relative preferences in each of the three parts of the questionnaire survey are presented below, for; (1) sustainability objectives, (2) mitigation options, and (3) accountability options.

Discussion

In this study, the systematic multi-criteria approach is applied to identify stakeholder preferences. The approach applies similar steps to the initial part of an AHP process [16], which identifies relevant criteria, arranges them into value-trees, and conducts a pairwise comparison technique to assign relative importance, i.e. weights. While an AHP proceeds with mathematically advanced impact assessments to judge on alternatives, this study aims to involve multiple stakeholders to assign

Concluding remarks

The CFP reform insists that enhanced bottom-up stakeholder participation, including the fishing industry, is needed to move closer to context-specific realities and to ensure bottom-up compliance to management. Although the ACs have been established to facilitate stakeholder participation in bottom-up advise to Member States concerning fisheries management, it remains unclear how to possibly incorporate stakeholder perceptions in fisheries management in practice.

The systematic multi-criteria

Acknowledgements

We would very much like to thank all the stakeholders who filled in the questionnaire, and the ones who distributed and encouraged others to also fill it in. We would also like to thank colleagues who provided feedback throughout the process of conducting the survey. In particular, a special thank goes to Paul de Groot at Wageningen Economic Research (Wageningen University and Research; WUR) who distributed and collected all the questionnaires. Thanks also to anonymous reviewers. The findings

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