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Considering communities in fisheries

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 Marine Policy ∎ (∎∎∎∎) ∎∎∎–∎∎∎

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Marine Policy
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/marpol

Considering communities in fisheries management

Courtney Lyons a,n, Benjamin Blount b, Courtney Carothers c, Meredith Marchioni d,
Reade Davis e, Philip Loring f
a
University of Alaska Fairbanks, School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences, 17101 Pt. Lena Loop Rd., Juneau, AK 99801, United States
b
Ben Blount Informatics, 13239 Spring Run Rd., Helotes, TX 78023, United States
c
University of Alaska Fairbanks, School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences, 1007 West 3rd Ave, Suite 100, Anchorage, AK 99501, United States
d
Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Division of Subsistence, 1255 W 8th St., Juneau, AK 99811, United States
e
Memorial University of Newfoundland, Department of Anthropology, Queen's College, 210 Prince Philip Drive, NL, Canada A1C 5S7
f
University of Saskatchewan, School of Environment and Sustainability, 117 Science Place, Saskatoon, SK, Canada S7N 5C8

art ic l e i nf o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Fisheries management in the United States, the European Union, and other parts of the globe, increas-
Received 9 May 2016 ingly reflects a burgeoning realization that fisheries management policies affect not only fishermen, but
Accepted 9 May 2016 also the broader communities in which fishermen work and reside. Understanding fishing communities,
however, is not a straightforward task. Researchers draw upon many methodologies across diverse
Keywords: disciplines in the attempt to better understand the needs of fishing communities and the ways in which
Fisheries management fisheries management programs affect these communities. This special issue draws together interna-
Communities tional research on fishing communities, highlighting the diverse relationships between people, places
Assessment and their fish and fisheries. Rather than attempting to consolidate these complex, multifarious re-
Ethnography
lationships into simple metrics, the papers presented in this issue illuminate community needs and
wants from a variety of frameworks highlighting the importance of meaningfully understanding local
contexts. These papers represent novel frameworks and case studies, adding depth of scholarly knowl-
edge to a relatively understudied segment of fisheries management. Specifically, the goal of this issue is
to advance the inclusion of community considerations in fisheries management processes. While ap-
proaching the topic of fishing communities from diverse perspectives, the papers in this special issue
work together to provide a broad view of the concerns and conflicts existent in these communities. They
highlight the need for management endeavors to be flexible, broad, and inclusive, providing potential
tools and frameworks to aid in management projects.
& 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
Fisheries management as a discipline has broadened in the past
few decades to include concerns such as ecosystems, livelihoods,
community sustainability, and well-being. Despite this, day-to-day
management efforts remain primarily focused on stock assess-
ments and fish ecology. While efforts have been made to in-
corporate broader ecological concerns and economic considera-
tions, the non-economic social sciences have remained particu-
larly marginalized, despite legislation in many countries around
the globe, mandating the inclusion of various human dimensions
in the fisheries management process (e.g., US [1], EU [2], Canada
[3], FAO [4]).
n
Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: courtney.lyons@gmail.com (C. Lyons),
ben.blount23@gmail.com (B. Blount), clcarothers@alaska.edu (C. Carothers),
meredith.marchioni@gmail.com (M. Marchioni), reade.davis@mun.ca (R. Davis),
phil.loring@usask.ca (P. Loring).
Many scholars have proposed reasons for the continued mar-
ginalization of non-economic social sciences and these reasons
range from the preferences for quantitative data typically used in
management [5,6] to the epistemological, that is, the destabilizing
force non-economic social science represents to current dynamics
of power and control within the fisheries management community
[7]. While there are a host of barriers to inclusion, the social sci-
ences have much to contribute to the fisheries management pro-
cess—from increasing trust between fishermen and managers [8],
to ground-truthing quantitative models [9], to determining areas
of conflict and misunderstanding between stakeholders [10], to
development of social indicators for community vulnerability and
resilience [11], and to reconsideration of Optimal Yield (OY) in
relation to seafood availability and management [12–14]. This
special issue, therefore, discusses recent anthropological research
on fishing communities in an effort to highlight the utility of these
approaches to the management process, as well as, to discuss ways
in which these concepts might be better integrated into fisheries
management efforts.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.marpol.2016.05.006
0308-597X/& 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Please cite this article as: C. Lyons, et al., Considering communities in fisheries management, Mar. Policy (2016), http://dx.doi.org/
10.1016/j.marpol.2016.05.006i
2 C. Lyons et al. / Marine Policy ∎ (∎∎∎∎) ∎∎∎–∎∎∎
In the US, the push to include social science in fisheries man-
agement dates back to the mid-1990s [15,16]. A new standard
(National Standard 8) was implemented, requiring that managers
“take into account the importance of fishery resources to fishing
communities in order to: (1) provide for the sustained participa-
tion of such communities, and (2) to the extent practicable,
minimize adverse economic impacts on such communities.” This
opened the door, at least legislatively, for increased social science
research, in particular anthropological research, in order to ac-
count for the importance of fishing communities and their cultural
and economic sustainability. These amendments situated fishing
communities within the management framework, though the
extent of their integration into practical management efforts re-
mains limited. In their landmark publication, Abbott-Jamieson and
Clay [17] document the emergence of fisheries anthropology, and
especially its inclusion in NOAA and Council committees.
The work of anthropologists within NOAA Fisheries has helped
to focus attention on issues of socioeconomic well-being. There
has even been some limited success in making contributions to
policy, as in the case of the social indicators discussed below. In
reality, however, despite their continued efforts, social scientists
have had only marginal success in influencing and impacting
fisheries management. The vast majority of personnel and re-
sources in the federal-level fisheries management apparatus are
devoted exclusively to natural science. Virtually all directorship
positions at all levels in NOAA Fisheries are occupied by fish
biologists, fish ecologists, and stock status specialists. Each Council
is supported by a Regional Fishery Science Center, where person-
nel collect, manage, and analyze multiple streams of data, col-
lected on periodic bases. Data collection and analysis efforts are
increasingly complex. The stock assessment model used in the
South Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico (Stock Synthesis 3.4), for
example, is a statistical catch-at-age model that will accommodate
more than 1100 parameters (groups of related measurable vari-
ables), but none of them are specifically social or economic. The six
regional science centers all have the responsibility for stock status
data, but they differ in terms of their inclusion of any “human
dimensions” in their focus and research. The Northwest Regional
Fishery Science Center in Seattle, for example, includes “human
caused stress/risks” as one of their five primary areas of interest,
and the Northeast Regional Fishery Science Center includes
statements on the NOAA webpage on science center [18] that the
Center includes “social and economic research in support of the
fishery management process.”
The seven papers in this special issue were presented in earlier
forms at the 75th Meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology
in Pittsburgh, PA on March 25, 2015. Lyons and Carothers orga-
nized three sessions at those meetings around the theme of
Community Considerations in Fishery Systems. These papers pri-
marily utilized anthropological theories and methods to under-
stand fishing communities, and were primarily based on research
conducted in the U. S. While not all aspects or types of fisheries
anthropological research are represented, the papers presented in
this special issue individually and collectively give an overview of
the issues and concerns that characterize recent research in the
field. The individual papers fall under two broad categories:
(1) those concerned with increasing our understandings of fishing
communities and (2) those concerned with developing assess-
ments of these communities for integration into the management
process.
2. Understanding fishing communities
Fishing communities do not exist in isolation, nor do they
consist of a homogeneous and undifferentiated set of residents.
Please cite this article as: C. Lyons, et al., Considering communities in fisheries management, Mar. Policy (2016), http://dx.doi.org/
10.1016/j.marpol.2016.05.006i
Rather, fishing communities are highly varied, encompassing in-
dividuals with direct and indirect connections to fishing. It is,
therefore, useful to take a broad, multifaceted approach to the idea
of community, when considering the community-level implica-
tions of fishery policies. With that goal in mind, the four papers in
the first section discuss disparate aspects of community, focusing
on how relationships with fish resources vary among commu-
nities, and identifying potential threats to these relationships. In
particular, these papers focus on the community formed by fish-
ermen's wives (Calhoun et al.), geographical communities in
Alaska (Donkersloot) and Russia (Nakhshina) and interactions
between the community of fisheries enforcers and fishermen
(Moon and Conway).
In their paper, Sarah Calhoun, Flaxen Conway, and Suzanne
Russell seek to incorporate gender analysis into the understanding
of fishing communities. Their article documents women's con-
tributions to Oregon fisheries, which have been vital to commu-
nity resilience, adaptation, and well-being. Their paper discusses
the development of an oral history project, “Voices From the West
Coast.” The project creates an oral history fishery database for the
states of Washington, Oregon, and California in collaboration with
the NOAA Northwest Fishery Science Center, Oregon State Uni-
versity, and Newport Fishermen's Wives. The major part of their
paper reports on the research methods and on the thematic
components that emerge from the analyses. The themes include
“taking care of the family and maritime household,” “increases in
roles in fisheries management, policy, and decision-making,” and
“work within the processing sector,” among others. The activities
of these women were seen as strengthening resilience by being
adaptive and contributing to local knowledge. The authors con-
clude by pointing out that the research shows that management
and policy-making would profit from greater attention to and in-
clusion of the manifold ways in which women contribute to sta-
bility and thus resilience.
Rachel Donkersloot draws upon an ethnographic examination
of North Pacific Fishery Management Council (NPFMC) efforts to
develop a new catch-share program. The paper draws upon a
political ecology framework (briefly, ecological information and
processes channeled through political considerations and out-
comes) to analyze ethnographic data collected from publicly
available documents and attendance at public meetings. These
methods allowed Donkersloot to contextualize the discussion
within the political spaces and perspectives that inform decisions.
In effect she has produced a meta-document tracing the central
elements of the debate and making available a “road-map through
time of the unfolding of points, positions, arguments, and debates
that eventually led to the development of the GOA (Gulf of Alaska)
Trawl Bycatch Management Program”. She notes that the exercise
of power by those engaged in the discussions did not include
fishermen who would be the most negatively affected by the move
to individual transferrable quotas in the new system. The research
is an excellent example of how an ethnographic approach can
produce detailed and historically rich accounts and derive con-
clusions that would not otherwise be visible.
Maria Nakhshina, examines social issues in Russian fisheries,
which closely parallel those in US communities. Nakhshina's work
draws upon a richly detailed ethnography of communities on the
coast of the White Sea, in particular the salmon fisheries in the
Arkhangelsk oblast. A major concern of participants in the salmon
fisheries is to sustain access to fishing within communities that
have had historical rights to the fish. Recent developments have
essentially nullified legal rights to that access. Local Arkhangelsk
fishermen and activists argue for access on the bases of cultural
identity, indigeneity, and traditions of the Pomor people in the
region. The paper reports on a series of activities by fisheries
management officials and organizations to increase and stabilize
 C. Lyons et al. / Marine Policy ∎ (∎∎∎∎) ∎∎∎–∎∎∎
community access to salmon fishing. Cultural identity thus has
become a factor in management negotiations. Nakhshina reports
that some positive changes have occurred, but they are still con-
strained by federal law, similar to cases in the US. The improve-
ments in access have been accompanied by a wariness that en-
actment of new legislation could also be used to further control
people's access to the salmon fisheries.
Ruby Moon and Flaxen Conway, by contrast, define community
not on the basis of location, but in terms of fishery participation
and regulation. Their research is based on semi-structured inter-
views with trawl fishermen and regulation enforcers and sought to
understand regulatory compliance. They found that three key
points structure regulatory compliance in Oregon's trawl fleet. The
first of these was “the connections a person has with others to gain
regulatory information,” including the opportunities that in-
dividuals have to interact with each other and to keep abreast of
contemporary events and issues. The second theme was about
“tools used to ensure compliance,” for example, whether or not the
fishery was an ITQ system. A quota system constrained the inter-
actions among fishermen and between them and enforcers, thus
channeling information and knowledge. The third theme was “le-
vel of knowledge and understanding regarding regulation,” which
appeared to be related to the overall position of a fisherman within
the industry. Finally, the authors note that different types of re-
lationships exist among the trawlers and the enforcers, and are
mediated by the status of the fishermen, for example boat owner
versus skipper. Thus, making generalization even within a single
community of fishermen difficult.
3. Assessing fishing communities
It is not enough to simply document and describe the concerns
of individual fishing communities. For these data to be of use,
methodologies must be developed to integrate such under-
standings into the management process. This is a difficult task for
many reasons, including the potentially destabilizing nature of
non-economic social science insights on management conventions
and approaches, as well as the inherently multifaceted nature of
fishing communities themselves. Therefore, attempts to integrate
these kinds of data draw upon a variety of tools, some well es-
tablished and others still in development. These include quanti-
tative measures designed to generalize, as well as qualitative
techniques that provide nuanced and local understandings of
communities. The three papers in this section span this spectrum
and include quantitative work on social indicators (Colburn et al.),
ethnographic examinations of storm damage and resilience (Clay
et al.), and qualitative analyses of vulnerability (Lyons et al.).
Lisa Colburn, Michael Jepson, Changhua Weng, Tarsila Seara,
Jeremy Weiss, and Jon Hare examine the potential for social in-
dicators in the assessment of fishing communities [19–22]. A major
aim of their work is to identify fishing communities and to
document their connectedness to given fisheries through infra-
structure and occupational networks. Drawing upon large extant
community datasets and building on previous research they cre-
ated three sets of social indicators for US fishing communities:
Fishing Dependence, Social Vulnerability, and Climate Change
Vulnerability. These indices are now available for use in manage-
ment to assess communities on a suite of threats and to determine
how a particular fisheries management program might affect re-
sidents. These indicators provide a method to address the re-
quirements of National Standard 8 in principled, quantitative ways
and based on substantial data. They can, therefore, be seen as
major steps toward addressing the concerns about communities as
indicated in National Standard 8.
In their paper, Patricia Clay and Lisa Colburn use mixed
Please cite this article as: C. Lyons, et al., Considering communities in fisheries management, Mar. Policy (2016), http://dx.doi.org/
10.1016/j.marpol.2016.05.006i
3
methods to examine the role of social bonds in community re-
covery after natural disasters. Drawing upon survey and interview
research, Clay and Colburn report that fishing communities in New
York were among the hardest hit by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, due
to their proximity to the coasts and engagement with ocean
structures. They note, in fact, that the US Department of Com-
merce declared both coastal infrastructure and ocean structures
disaster [23,24]. The research by Clay and Colburn focused on
characteristics of long term recovery of fishing communities and
related occupations and businesses. Toward that end, they con-
ducted a survey in February-March 2014 of 958 fishing and fishing
related businesses. The survey was followed by interviews with
fishermen, seafood dealers, bait and tackle store owners and
managers, marina owners and managers, and aquaculture facility
owners and managers.
Clay and Colburn reported that in the course of their research
and analyses, a central issue emerged, the importance of social
bonds. The most frequently mentioned option in the data results
as important to recovery was “family, friends, and community,”
that response coming from fishermen and fishing-related busi-
nesses. Clay and Colburn also noted that fishermen and fishing-
related businessmen expressed a sense of community by talking
about the importance of “dedication of crew,” “faithful customers,”
and “hard-working-and-willing-to-help-people.” All of those refer
to the importance of social bonds. Also in the survey section on
aids to recovery, the most frequent response was “family, friends,
and community.” It is clear that the recovery process was seen by
the individuals affected as both social and economic, reflecting the
importance of community. The importance of ethnography is also
reflected as a “discovery process,” rendering the perceptions of the
community visible. Underscoring the importance of making in-
formation “visible,” the authors noted that social bonds was not, in
fact, a primary focus of their work. That result emerged from the
ethnography.
Finally, Courtney Lyons, Courtney Carothers, and Katherine
Reedy propose a method for including qualitative data in fisheries
management decision-making. To this end they developed a
qualitative assessment tool: the Means, Meanings, and Contexts
(MMC) Framework, drawn from Marsh [25], which relies on eth-
nographic research techniques and place-making theories. The
framework assesses community vulnerabilities related to eco-
nomic (“means”), place-based (“meanings”), and historical (“con-
text”) concerns. To test this framework they collected ethnographic
data in two Alaskan communities, St. George and St. Paul, Alaska.
From their analyses, the authors conclude that in St. George,
overall vulnerability is high, due to numerous difficult aspects of
their history and to inadequate infrastructure. St. Paul, however, is
evaluated as moderately vulnerable. Comparatively, that commu-
nity has more social capital, autonomy, and cohesive sense of
place. Their findings contrast starkly with quantitative assess-
ments of vulnerability conducted on the same communities [26].
Though definitions of vulnerability varied between the two stu-
dies, these results underline the importance of qualitative data in
the management process.
While the work of integrating non-economic social science into
the fisheries management process is difficult, and fraught with
both cultural and epistemological problems, it remains an im-
portant and worthwhile endeavor. The integration of the social
sciences into fisheries management will necessarily be an active
and ongoing process involving negotiation, innovation, and edu-
cation. The papers presented here present a variety of approaches
of potential use in the management process. It is the hope of the
guest editors of this special issue that these papers will help foster
a productive dialogue around the role of the social sciences in
fisheries management.
4 C. Lyons et al. / Marine Policy ∎ (∎∎∎∎) ∎∎∎–∎∎∎
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all the participants of the Community
Considerations in Fisheries Systems sessions at the 75th annual
Society for Applied Anthropology Meeting. Co-authors on this ar-
ticle were session organizers (Lyons and Carothers), discussants
(Blount and Marchioni), and presenters (Davis and Loring). We
also thank all our reviewers and the editors of Marine Policy for
the opportunity to put together this special issue.
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