Broadening Participation in Fisheries Management Planning: A Tale of Two Committees

Abstract

Management agencies increasingly seek to broaden stakeholder participation in fisheries decision making beyond commercial fisheries groups. This precipitates the challenge of meaningfully involving additional stakeholders without unjustifiably diminishing the role of commercial users. This research examines participants'; evaluations of one attempt to broaden but balance participation in groundfish management planning on Canada's Pacific coast. Commercial fishery and noncommercial fishery stakeholders were separated onto two advisory committees with more and less control over the design of the management plan, respectively. Respondents from the noncommercial fishery committee were accepting of this asymmetrical arrangement, provided they had sufficient opportunities to influence the design of the advisory process and define overarching objectives that would bound potential outcomes. Findings suggest several reasons that involvement in these early steps may be particularly important to meaningful participation of noncommercial fishery stakeholders within asymmetrical, multicommittee processes.

Keywords:

• advisory committee
• Canada
• collaborative decision making
• consensus
• fisheries management
• fisheries planning
• governance
• stakeholder participation

This research is supported in part by a grant from the British Columbia Ministry of Environment Oceans and Marine Fisheries Division, a University of British Columbia Graduate Fellowship, and a Donald S. McPhee Fellowship, all conferred on the author. Thanks to the research interviewees, all of whom were remarkably generous with their time and insights. Anonymous reviewers provided comments that improved this article. Thanks also to Paul Wood, Evelyn Pinkerton, Colette Wabnitz, and Joanna Reid, who provided helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Notes

^a Inside and outside rockfish fisheries are prosecuted along geographically separated areas of the coast and licensed separately.

^b Fish processing representatives were minimally involved in the Caucus consensus process.

Many aboriginal groups in BC reject the term “stakeholder” in issues of land and resource use. They argue that unceded rights and title to their traditional territories and resources distinguish them from other interest groups labeled as stakeholders. With no intention of derogating from those claims, they are included in the term “stakeholder” here to remain consistent with common terminology in the broader planning literature.

See Mikalsen and Jentoft (2001) for a scoring of fisheries stakeholders according to Mitchell's attributes.

The Marine Conservation Caucus, an umbrella group of environmental nongovernmental organizations in BC, left the Committee shortly after its inception in protest of DFO's data-sharing policies and the Committee's refusal to adopt a framework for bounding and evaluating the outcomes of the Initiative. Nevertheless, Marine Conservation Caucus members did attend several subsequent Committee meetings as observers.

See Ahousaht First Nation v. Canada [Fisheries and Oceans] 2007; Haida Nation v. British Columbia [Minister of Forests] 2004. Additional, fisheries-specific examples include R. v. Sparrow, R. v. Gladstone, R. v. NTC Smokehouse, R. v. Van der Peet, and R. v. Kapp.