Identifying stakeholder preferences for rebuilding a Canadian Atlantic redfish fishery—limitations and benefits of different opinion survey approaches
Publication: Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences
26 November 2024
Abstract
Fisheries management authorities seek to improve the incorporation of stakeholders’ preferences into decision-making but conventional approaches to assessing stakeholder viewpoints may risk under-representing a diversity of opinions. In Atlantic Canada's Units 1 and 2 redfish fisheries, there are competing visions about re-developing the fishery following historical overfishing. A management strategy evaluation (MSE) sought to identify which fishery objectives should guide the formulation of performance metrics. Following the MSE, we carried out a study to further sample the social, economic, and ecological objectives for the fishery using multiple questioning methods, i.e., workshops, questionnaires, and interviews. Results of interviews and questionnaires identified areas of consensus and complexity of opinion among the different groups (commercial, government, and Indigenous), and showed that the workshop-based performance metrics defined in the MSE underrepresented the diversity of stakeholder preferences, particularly regarding social and economic goals. Multi-method and multi-disciplinary approaches to formalizing objectives are resource-intensive. However, there is value in applying multiple methods to systematically develop and formalize performance metrics that accurately reflect a diversity of stakeholders’ priorities for the fishery.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences
e-First
History
Received: 24 July 2023
Accepted: 24 July 2024
Accepted manuscript online: 13 August 2024
Version of record online: 26 November 2024
Copyright
© 2024 Authors Deith, Skerritt, McAllister, and The Crown. Permission for reuse (free in most cases) can be obtained from copyright.com.
Data Availability Statement
Data generated and analyzed during this study are not publicly available due to concerns for the anonymity of respondents. Anonymized and collated data may be available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Key Words
Authors
Author Contributions
Conceptualization: DV, MKM
Data curation: MCMD, DJS
Formal analysis: MCMD, DJS
Funding acquisition: DV, MKM
Investigation: MCMD, DJS, MKM
Methodology: MCMD, DJS, DV, MKM
Project administration: MKM
Software: MCMD
Supervision: MKM
Visualization: MCMD, DJS
Writing – original draft: MCMD
Writing – review & editing: MCMD, DJS, DV, MKM
Competing Interests
The authors declare there are no competing interests.
Funding Information
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)
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Mairin C.M. Deith, Daniel J. Skerritt, Divya Varkey, and Murdoch K. McAllister. Identifying stakeholder preferences for rebuilding a Canadian Atlantic redfish fishery—limitations and benefits of different opinion survey approaches. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences.
e-First
https://doi.org/10.1139/cjfas-2023-0208
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