Alternatives to conventional management: lessons from small-scale fisheries.

Abstract

Based on long-term research on community-based resource management, and using small-scale fisheries as an example, alternatives to conventional management may be characterized by: a shift in philosophy to embrace uncertainty and complexity; an appreciation of fisheries as social-ecological systems and more broadly as complex adaptive systems; an expansion of scope of management information to include fishers' knowledge; formulation of management objectives that incorporate livelihood issues; and development of participatory management with community-based institutions and cross-scale governance. Such alternative management is adaptive as well as participatory in nature, as it engages the knowledge of resource users, their adaptive learning, and their institutions for self-governance. It is human-oriented but uses an ecosystem approach, effectively linking social systems with natural systems. Such management breaks out of the old tradition of management-as-control. It effectively redefines resource to mean, not commodity, but elements of an ecosystem that supports essential processes as well as human needs. It also redefines management to refer to governance, learning and adaptive management, oriented to maintaining the productive capacity and resilience of the linked social-ecological system.

En se basant sur des recherches a long terme sur la gestion communautaire des ressources et en servant de la peche a petite echelle comme exemple, l'article presente les caracteristiques des solutions de rechange a la gestion conventionnelle : changement de philosophie, afin d'inclure l'incertitude et la complexite; comprehension de la peche en tant que systeme socioecologique et, plus largement, en tant que systeme complexe d'adaptation; elargissement de l'eventail des informations associees a la gestion afin d'inclure les connaissances des pecheurs; elaboration d'objectifs de gestion qui integrent les questions associees au vivant; et developpement d'une gestion participative dans les institutions du milieu communautaire et la gouvernance a diverses echelles. Une telle gestion a une nature adaptative mais aussi participative car elle engage dans l'auto-gouvernance les connaissances des utilisateurs de la ressource, leurs apprentissages adaptatifs et leurs institutions. Elle s'interesse aux humains mais utilise une approche ecosystemique en creant avec efficacite des liens entre systemes sociaux et systemes naturels. Elle met fin a la gestion en tant que controle et redefinit la ressource, qui n'est plus une commodite mais un element d'un ecosysteme qui repond a des processus essentiels autant qu'a des besoins humains. Elle propose aussi une nouvelle definition de la gestion, qui inclut la gouvernance, l'apprentissage et la gestion adaptative, afin de maintenir la capacite productive et la resilience du systeme socio-ecologique.

Keywords

Fisheries; complex adaptive systems; traditional knowledge; livelihoods; ecosystem-based management

Introduction

A comprehensive critique of conventional environment and resource management (managerial ecology) requires the exploration of alternatives to learn from lessons of the various experiments being carried out across Canada and the world. Established ideas need to be challenged with new ideas. Alternative approaches are appearing in a number of areas: fisheries, wildlife, forests, protected areas. Some of them are not 'management' at all in the conventional sense of centralized command-and-control, based on expert knowledge, aiming for the control of nature, and treating people as if they were separate from the environment

Of the various areas of resource and environmental management, fisheries provide one of the clearest examples of the managerial approach: the uncritical use of managerial tools and concepts; anthropocentric ethics; authoritarian political frameworks; and deterministic, control-oriented scientific worldviews (Bavington 2002). Worldwide, the management of fisheries has often failed in terms of both social and ecological criteria (Pitcher et al. 1998, Charles 2001). In particular, the governance of small-scale fisheries has been problematic (Mahon 1997, Berkes et al. 2001). Why conventional management has failed is discussed, in part, in the companion theme issue of Environments (Bavington and Slocombe 2002).

A number of people have been thinking critically about conventional fisheries, including fisheries biologist Henry Regier: "I have a sense that the population dynamics approach [stock assessment methodology], as it has long been used generally for fisheries management (read mis-management!) has converged conceptually and practically to fit a vertically linear capitalistic approach to the business of fishing. The conventional population dynamics approach fits the 'rational actor model' (i.e., the stupid actor model!) of neo-conservative economics and Hardin's 'tragedy of the commons' ... It does not serve well a communitarian, nested-interactive model of commons use ..." (Regier, personal communication, 2002).

In this paper, I explore further why conventional managerial approaches to fisheries have not worked well, and I identify the elements of a different kind of fishery governance better suited especially for small-scale fisheries. In seeking an alternative, more holistic approach, I use two starting points. The first one is the necessity of combining natural and social systems. The evolving theory and practice of ecosystem-based management explicitly includes humans in the system, instead of trying to separate them out--as if that were possible. I use the term social-ecological system to emphasize that social systems and ecological systems are linked, and that the delineation between the social and the ecological is artificial and arbitrary (Berkes and Folke 1998).

The second starting point concerns the need to manage environment and resource systems for resilience, rather than for products and commodities. The argument here is that maximization or optimization approaches tend to reduce natural variability, impairing renewal capacity of ecosystems and making social-ecological systems fragile and vulnerable (Holling and Meffe 1996). Since social-ecological systems are characterized by cycles of renewal, their integrity is closely related to their ability for self-organization, renewal, learning and adapting (Gunderson and Holling 2002). Systems need to be nurtured for diversity and flexibility. Such resilient systems contain the components needed for renewal and reorganization (Folke et al. 2002).

These two points provide the context for the critique of managerial approaches, and for the search for alternatives. If conventional managerial approaches do not work, what would the alternatives look like? What can we learn from the diversity of emergent ideas? In this regard, first I provide an introduction to small-scale fisheries. Then I discuss the relevant issues and explore new approaches through five themes:

* The need for a shift in our philosophy of resource management;

* The appreciation of fisheries as social-ecological systems, and more broadly as complex adaptive systems;

* The need to expand the scope of information and knowledge, including the use of fishers' knowledge;

* The need for broader objectives for management that can deal with social-ecological systems, and in particular with social objectives such as sustainable livelihoods and communities; and

* The significance of participatory management, with community-based institutions and cross-scale governance.

Small-Scale Fisheries

There are some 51 million fishers in the world, and all but 500,000 of them work in small-scale fisheries. According to FAO figures, some 95 percent of the world's fishers are in developing countries, producing 58 percent of the 98 million metric tons of the annual marine fish catch (Berkes et al. 2001). The small-scale fisheries sector produces the bulk of the food fish catch for direct human consumption, income and livelihoods. Yet small-scale fisheries have been marginalized throughout the world through government policies that tend to favour large-scale, commodity-oriented fisheries.

Small-scale fisheries include traditional, artisanal and subsistence fisheries. They may be mechanized but tend to use traditional fishing gears such as small nets, traps, lines and spears. Biodiversity of the catch tends to be high. Harvests include a greater variety of species than in large-scale fisheries, and a greater variety of small stocks distributed over numerous management units (Figure 1). Small-scale fisheries tend to predominate in the developing world, however, they are also common in coastal areas of developed countries such as along the Atlantic coast of the USA and Canada (Apostle et al. 1998).

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]