From Boom and Bust to Local Stewardship: A Governance Benchmark for Celtic Sea Fisheries Management

Abstract

Fisheries management in Ireland under the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) has been characterised by a sense of separation, both spatially and in terms of values, between the governors and the governed. To counter this the European Commission's Green Paper on CFP Reform has flagged the development of participatory or co-management arrangements as potential tools for incentivising more sustainable fisheries management. Additionally the principles of an ecosystem approach, which is nominally the foundation of the CFP, stress the beneficial outcomes of strengthening participation in management and in devolving management to a more local level. Governance benchmarking aims to improve understanding fisheries governance regimes and in so doing to highlight strengths in the system which can be built on and weaknesses which require addressing. In this paper I apply this technique to a case study in participatory fisheries management---the Celtic Sea Herring Management Advisory Committee (CSHMAC). This committee, although formally only advisory, has developed into an informal management network incorporating a strong industry-science partnership. I discuss the formation of the Committee as a problem solving forum in response to a resource crisis and the development of learning processes and behavioural change which were required to build management capacity and which culminated in a successful stock recovery plan. For comparative purposes I also benchmark two other Irish fisheries with differing success levels in stock recovery and varying governance profiles. The impact of a co-management process on fisheries governance and the outlook for implementation of an ecosystem approach are also analysed in the context of these fisheries.