Methods to use fishers' knowledge for fisheries assessment and management

J. M. ORENSANZ; A. M. PARMA; A. CINTI

Panamá

Workshop; Workshop "Fisher's Knowledge and the Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries Management"; 2013

FAO

Fisher´s knowledge (FK) pertains to all the components of a fishery, conceived as a social-ecological system: the target resources and the ecosystems of which they are part, the fishing process, and the social, cultural, economical and governance subsystems. We consider FK from two different perspectives: utility and governance. The first focuses on the content and value of FK; the second emphasizes the role of fishers in assessment and the management process. Under the utility perspective, fishers are providers of information. Critical aspects are the assessment of reliability of the information provided, including the identification of various forms of cognitive biases, and the design of methodological approaches that minimize these biases. Under the governance perspective, collaboration is seen as an intellectual partnership between fishers, scientists and managers, in contrast to cooperative activities in which fishers assist in the execution of particular tasks but have no significant intellectual contribution. We discuss merits and limitations of the two related modes of fishers´ engagement in assessment and management as information providers and as collaborators and illustrate them with a selection of examples from artisanal and industrial fisheries, mostly from the Americas. Finally, we highlight guidelines for the success of collaborative action derived from the cumulative experience from a number of projects, and emphasize the importance of the institutional context within which FK is communicated and used in assessment and management. Institutional ambits for collaboration need to be established at multiple scales, from the local scale of the fishing communities to the regional scale at which strategic management issues are addressed.