“It's About Seeing What's Actually Out There”: Quantifying fishers' ecological knowledge and biases in a small-scale commercial fishery as a path toward co-management

Abstract

As fishery science continues to make strides toward stakeholder-inclusive, co-management styles of fishery management, there remain concerns on how the participation of commercial fishers affects the direction of regulations, particularly where perceptions of fisher bias and self-interest dominate. Fishers, particularly in small-scale, artisanal fisheries, possess valuable fishers' ecological knowledge (FEK) on the status and trends of their resources and can provide valuable input during regulatory negotiations. FEK provides a second source of ecosystem information, and can be applied to management where other forms of data may be absent or difficult to regularly obtain through traditional research and monitoring approaches. The Q-Method was used to measure the subjective behaviors and biases of 42 commercial fishers and 54 island residents representing other stakeholder groups in St. Croix, United States Virgin Islands. This research shows that commercial fishers possess a unique, biased perspective that is identifiable against other stakeholder groups when issues of how best to manage the island's fishery resources arise. Within the commercial fishing community, a range of perspectives also exist, from those skeptical of management and discount concerns of unsustainable fishing effort to those who recognize the need for locally-appropriate management and consider their own involvement in management meetings to be instrumental in developing any such measures. By tapping into FEK, fishing behavior, and stakeholder biases, management decisions become more informed and opportunities to develop co-management increase. Such engagement efforts are particularly relevant for data-poor fisheries. FEK provides an alternate path from which to more fully understand fishery health and trends, thereby establishing the foundation from which locally appropriate and supported fishery management can form. FEK can also act as a bridge by managers to more fully invest in relationships and partnerships with the fishing community, thereby strengthening the fishers' sense of “ownership” of an otherwise common-pool resource, and allowing for the development of adaptive co-management opportunities that address the immediate needs of the fishery.