Benchmarking for fisheries governance

doi:10.1016/j.marpol.2006.12.007

Marine Policy

Volume 31, Issue 4, July 2007, Pages 470-479

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpol.2006.12.007 Get rights and content

Abstract

The paper develops a benchmarking framework to improve fisheries governance and promote resilient ecosystems and profitable fisheries. The benchmarking includes five key components: accountability, transparency, incentives, risk assessment and management; and adaptability. Collectively, these factors provide a framework to benchmark and improve fisheries governance. Initial findings from benchmarking in two of Australia's Commonwealth fisheries indicate that the framework provides an important tool to help overcome the underlying causes of unsustainability in capture fisheries—poor and/or ineffective fisheries governance.

Introduction

Fisheries governance involves two key challenges. The first is the need to understand the current state of the world, and especially the principal feedbacks of fisher and ecosystem dynamics. The second is the necessity to translate this knowledge into effective governance to achieve biological, social and economic goals. Using diverse experiences in fisheries management, we provide a framework to benchmark fisheries governance to improve performance and promote resilient ecosystems and profitable fisheries.

To explain why benchmarking is required, we first review the pitfalls and opportunities of current management paradigms and their implications for how fisheries are currently governed. Section 3 of the paper develops a benchmark framework as a synthesis of existing management approaches. The framework is built around five key governance concepts: accountability, transparency, incentives, risk assessment and management, and adaptability. Section 4 explores how the benchmarking is being developed and applied in Australia's Commonwealth fisheries. We conclude with the prospects for benchmarking to improve fisheries governance and resolve the on-going challenges of the conduct of fisheries in the marine environment.

Section snippets

Fisheries governance: pitfalls and opportunities

Before presenting the benchmarking framework we review the pitfalls and opportunities of approaches currently offered as ‘fixes’ to the decline of marine ecosystems. We first describe what the precautionary principle can and cannot deliver to managers, and use this to discuss the implications of reference points and target reference points in fisheries management. We also examine the failures of not connecting targets to instruments, and explain why incentives-based approaches alone cannot

Benchmarking for fisheries governance

We develop a synthesized approach to fisheries governance and a framework for benchmarking performance that provide a set of practical governance steps to implement the CCRF and EAF in tactical management decision-making. Our approach encompasses the notions of ecosystem, socio-economic, community and institutional sustainability [37] and focuses on the actions of all stakeholders, not just managers, to achieve persistence of desired states of the world, and resilience to speedily return to

Benchmarking the Australian Commonwealth fisheries

To illustrate how benchmarking might be applied, we evaluate the performance of two of Australia's Commonwealth fisheries. We emphasize that the extent to which the five governance factors can be used to improve fisheries governance is largely independent of the capacity of management authorities. For instance, in poor countries with few resources the ability to undertake risk assessment may appear limited, but the framework provides a guide to the causes of unsustainability and how they might

Concluding remarks

Many of the world's fisheries are overfished, marine ecosystems are under stress and the net returns from harvesting are well below their potential. The principal cause is poor and ineffective fisheries governance. Although several ‘fixes’ have been proposed, we contend that only with a logically constructed synthesis that benchmarks performance will fisheries governance achieve its full potential to respond to these challenges.

Building on the insights of the precautionary principle, ecosystem

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