Eliciting Values and Principles of Fishery Stakeholders in South Korea: A Methodological Exploration

Abstract

Growing importance of the governance concept has meant consideration and incorporation of wide interests and worldviews of various stakeholder groups. Yet this trend may also intensify complexity, as more diverse values and principles are represented. We design a simple and interactive survey-based technique to elicit and examine stakeholder values and principles in an effort to help guide natural resource governance. This exploratory approach, called “P+ sort” to recognize its methodological foundation on both pile sort and Q sort methods, utilizes a semistructured sorting procedure with verbal questions to capture both quantitative and qualitative data. An empirical application of P+ sort was conducted in South Korean fisheries, which were undergoing a governance reform. Results show promising utilities of P+ sort for identifying value priorities and salient principles of stakeholder groups, examining the convergence as well as notable differences in these elements, and providing policy-relevant input into the natural resource governance process.

Keywords:

• fishery resources
• interactive governance
• P+ sort
• principles
• stakeholders
• value elicitation

Acknowledgments

The authors thank three anonymous reviewers and Drs. Arn Keeling and Svein Jentoft for providing useful comments on an earlier version of the article. The authors also greatly thank those who participated in the survey, as well as key informants and community leaders.