Questions of Strategy in Fishery Management and Development
Authors: Rothschild B. J. 
Published: April 2011

Fishery management draws on the fields of management in general, development, and fishery management. To make significant advancements in fishery management we need to invest in institutions that are capable of asking the right questions, to develop efficient means of making the proper decisions in respect to these questions, and most importantly, to develop the capability to effect actions which will facilitate these decisions.We need to consider the complexity of the decision environment, and to have techniques for handling this complexity by insisting on analysis rather than intuition and on treating the fishery development problem as a system. The multiple-objectives problem needs to be grasped, and the questions of population dynamics need to be recast to explain departures from the existing simple models. We should consider in more detail the mathematics of programming theory. The most striking concept offered in this paper is that fishery management and development seem to be more preoccupied with tactics than with strategy.The first concept of fishery management involves the complexity of the decision environment, resulting from increasing technological capability, the rising number of international differences, increasing communication among states, and the aspirations of developing countries.The second is that because of these complexities more careful judgements must be made, and the scientific method employed more rigorously, including the use of systems analysis.This requires that we view fisheries as systems, with resource problems separate from biological problems.The fourth concept is that a broader view must be taken of the management process itself, which must be reviewed as a system. Further, management must appreciate biological, social, economic, and political objectives, and their complex interrelations. Many fisheries are said to be overcapitalized, but there have been few if any computations of optimal capital budgets, and little practical advice on strategies that can be followed by entrepreneurs. Economic objectives must be integrated into all the other objectives.Biological questions relate to stock and recruitment, yield per recruit, and relation between catch and effort. The phenomena related to these processes are not sufficiently understood to produce predictions useful for management purposes. Some of the models used up to now are outmoded, mostly because they tell us how much can be caught from a single stock, while many stocks may be under exploitation simultaneously. Further, they do not face the major problem in fishery management — that of dividing the catch among those who wish to participate in the harvest. Divisions currently made do not always make sense from the economic or social point of view, and sometimes do not make biological sense. As an index of "sense" we might consider the benefits that could be accrued from a resource if it were owned by a single individual.The mathematics of modelling for allocation of the catch is easy but the philosophical question of how to evaluate the various elements of the fishing process is not clear. Yet mathematical treatment allows a sharper focus of the problems, and allows us to look at a broader set of decision questions.The sixth concept is that we need to achieve a simplification of our system. The most important simplification is to partition the problems into those that involve strategy, those that involve tactics, and those that involve operations. For development we wish to maximize the efficiency with which we transform resources into utility. There has been a general disappointment in the performance of development in recent years, and it is clear that economic criteria alone are not suitable for guiding development policy. Social welfare must also be integrated into the system.To create a favorable environment for strategic decision-making it is necessary to have institutions that consider this problem in an explicit way; of particular relevance is the applied research institution to develop strategy.