Balancing scales — Opportunities and challenges in the management of spatially structured fisheries

PARMA, A.M.

Portmouth

Workshop; Workshop Reconciling Spatial Scales and Stock Structures for Fisheries Science and Management; 2011

Experience shows that fisheries management approaches that rely on centralized assessments and top-down enforcement of regulations are doomed to fail in small-scale coastal fisheries, where control of all landing sites scattered along the coast is too costly. Furthermore persistent gradients in productivity may require adjustments of harvesting strategies and reference points to local conditions. Territorial use rights in fisheries (TURFs) offer a suitable alternative for fisheries that target relatively sedentary species, such as benthic invertebrates or reef fishes, by providing incentives for fishers to cooperate in the management of their local resources, and by allowing for local experimentation with harvest controls to reflect local productivity. But the introduction of TURFs also poses significant challenges. Resource assessment programs and management institutions need to be redesigned in order to provide technical support at a diversity of nested spatial scales. Most critical are the questions related to the size of TURFs and distribution of access privileges, which need to take into account not only the biology of the target resources but also the social geography and traditional practices of the fishing communities. While spatially discrete, TURFs are not independent, neither biologically, nor socially or economically. Therefore, their performance will improve by coordination at the regional scale. In my talk I will discuss some successes and failures in the management of shellfisheries in Chile and Argentina that illustrate these problems.