COMANAGEMENT IN FISHERIES

1
CO-MANAGEMENT IN FISHERIES

• What is co-management?
• The decentralisation of fisheries management
  authority from national to lower levels of
  management
• The use of shared knowledge between scientists
  and resource users
• A collaborative and participatory decision making
  process between resource users, government and
  other stakeholders.

• Shared Knowledge
• Tacit versus discursive knowledge
• Oral versus written knowledge
• Anecdotal versus systematic information.

• Co-management models
• The Deference Model
• The Experience Based Knowledge Model
• Community Science

• Case Studies
• Ireland
• The Netherlands
• The Philippines

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WHAT IS CO-MANAGEMENT?

• Approaches based on decentralisation and
  bottom-up style fisheries management are becoming
  increasingly popular and are thought to hold the
  key to sustainable exploitation of marine
  resources
• Decentralisation of authority from national to
  lower levels of fisheries management together
  with increased user participation in management
  is on the political agenda in many countries in
  the developing world, Europe and North America
• A recent review suggested that several hundred
  cases of co-management at varying spatial scales
  already exist
• Fishers can be a valuable source of information,
  may have detailed knowledge of traditional and
  current patterns of exploitation and consumption
  and can provide insight into potential problems
  with management plans
• Fishers have sufficient knowledge to directly
  dispute the findings of professional scientists.
  Meaning research can be carried out
  collaboratively between resource users and
  scientists in order to gain a more complete
  understanding of the resource and thus bring
  about the rehabilitation of overexploited
  fisheries.

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SHARED KNOWLEDGE

• Tacit versus discursive knowledge
• Tacit knowledge is knowledge that people cannot
  (easily) express, whilst discursive knowledge is
  shared and expressed
• Tacit knowledge plays an important part in
  general discussions and institutions and
  knowledge. The extent to which fishers
  knowledge can be articulated in management
  debates has important implications for
  co-management, both from the perspective of
  mobilising fishers knowledge for rational
  management and of equitable control over the
  knowledge base
• Discursive knowledge can be articulated and
  enables effective participation in and shaping of
  political discussions.

• Oral versus written knowledge
• Whilst scientists and conservationists rely
  almost entirely on written information about a
  fishery, a considerable proportion of fishers
  knowledge is communicated in oral form
• Oral knowledge relies on memory and is additive
  rather than subordinative or analytical, meaning
  that it tends to be organised in flatter
  hierarchies than written information and involves
  fewer categories
• Oral communication is empathetic and
  participatory rather than objectively distanced.

• Anecdotal versus systematic information
• Systematic information is specifically data,
  rather than knowledge in a more general sense
• In principle, data is gathered by procedures.
  Where these are not identical across time and
  space, the way in which they vary is known and
  can be accounted for
• Information characterised as anecdotal means that
  the observations on which it is based were not
  made systematically and cannot be used to
  characterise phenomena at higher scale levels.

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Case Studies   Ireland   In Ireland, a
co-management programme for pelagic fisheries
that is empowered to invoke voluntary measures
and national by-laws has been established.
Whilst this is primarily a co-management
programme, an active research programme has also
been developed including fishers recommendations
for additional research that is backed up by both
the fishermens organisation and the state.   The
Netherlands   This project began with a deference
model to develop a reference fleet. Maintaining
close contact with participating fishers,
including a feedback system, was seen as critical
from the very beginning of the project. Dutch
fishermen have now monitored their plaice
discards since the beginning of 2005.
Previously, data on discards was mainly based on
estimations, so a more reliable database can now
be built.   The Philippines   The Philippines has
the largest number of community-based resource
management (CBCRM) programmes in the world. The
aim of the CBCRM projects is to place emphasis on
the increased participation of fishers in
fisheries management. The reason CBCRM projects
have been so successful in the Philippines is
that such projects contain a vast amount of local
knowledge for their successful implementation.
Co-management models The Deference Model The
Deference Model is the most widely accepted
common sense idea of science as a social
process. Scientists are the people which society
has trained and given the institutional and
physical tools to decide what is true about our
natural environment. It is their job and they
are best qualified to do it. The most widespread
of this type of collaborative work is data
gathering from scientists, in which fishers and
others act as research assistants. A common
example is tagging studies.   The Experience
Based Knowledge Model   This model incorporates
the Deference Model. The emphasis is on finding
local information that can supplement
research-based knowledge.   Community
Science   Bringing the dynamics of community
into the fisheries science process based on the
principle that encouraging open communication
increases understanding and makes management
institutions more sensitive to new developments
in the ecosystem, thereby facilitating adaptive
management.