Abstract
AbstractWe contrast two paradigms for fisheries management decision making: the “assessment” paradigm, which is based around stock assessments, and the “procedural” paradigm, which is based around management procedures. The assessment paradigm has difficulty in providing management for data‐poor stocks, and we illustrate this in the New Zealand context. In contrast, the procedural paradigm has the potential to be useful for the data‐poor stocks. However, to date, it has not served data‐poor fisheries well because most of the development of management procedures has been for high‐value, data‐rich stocks. This may be because several aspects of the procedural paradigm are misunderstood or neglected. Giving appropriate attention to these aspects will improve the application of fisheries management procedures, particularly for data‐poor stocks. For example, more attention needs to be given to the method for presenting evaluation results to decision makers in ways that more easily allow them to make trade‐offs among multiple management objectives. We also argue that the design, evaluation, and selection of management procedures should be treated as an exercise in engineering, particularly by applying generic solutions to data‐poor cases for which specific solutions are usually not readily developed.
Highlights
We characterize two paradigms for fisheries management decision making: the ‘‘assessment paradigm,’’ which is based around stock assessments, and the ‘‘procedural paradigm,’’ which is based around management procedures
Some suggest that management procedures should ideally involve the estimation of quantities, such as current stock status relative to biomass at maximum sustainable yield’’ (Bmsy)
This misses the point of the procedural paradigm: using simulation to evaluate how well the alternative management procedures perform with respect to performance measures rather than estimating those measures along the way
Summary
New Zealand Seafood Industry Council Ltd., Private Bag 24901, Wellington 6142, New Zealand. To date, it has not served data-poor fisheries well because most of the development of management procedures has been for high-value, data-rich stocks This may be because several aspects of the procedural paradigm are misunderstood or neglected. There are few other forms of management that have to incorporate such high levels of uncertainty into the decision-making process This characteristic has necessitated unique approaches to the practice of fisheries management. Received November 28, 2008; accepted July 19, 2009 Published online December 31, 2009 are low in value and for which few data are typically collected For these fisheries, management decision making is effectively disabled. We characterize two paradigms for fisheries management decision making: the ‘‘assessment paradigm,’’ which is based around stock assessments, and the ‘‘procedural paradigm,’’ which is based around management procedures. For brevity, we presume some familiarity with both fisheries stock assessments and fisheries management procedures
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