An integrated view of fisheries: tunnelling between silos

Global recognition of the need for an ecosystem approach to fisheries and its subsequent formalization in the 1990s and 2000s were, to me, natural and necessary developments that put a name and a clearer form to an approach that I have been pursuing throughout my career. During that progression, I have drifted from fisheries ecology into stock assessment and provision of advice for marine fisheries management and on to a stimulating mix of geographical areas and fishery themes while working for the Food and Agricultural Organization in Rome, with some detours along the way. My work has focused on supporting the application of scientific knowledge in fisheries and has broadly followed three themes: environmental influences on fish productivity, fisheries management and governance, and the role of politics and policy in fisheries. This paper reviews work on each of those themes and presents some conclusions that I have come to on the challenges and obstacles to sustainable and responsible fisheries. The more difficult of these challenges centre on conflicts between social and economic goals and the long-term need for sustainability. Unsurprisingly, I have not found any simple solutions for them, and hold the view that we can only achieve a sustainable and equitable future if we look at the big picture and address the fundamental causes of these problems.

Introduction

The concept of an ecosystem approach to fisheries (EAF) and to natural resource use in general is closely linked to sustainable development. It evolved over decades during the second half of the 20th century (Garcia and Cochrane, 2005). The approach achieved global political endorsement at the World Summit for Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002. Paragraph 30 of the WSSD Plan of Implementation called for the implementation of the ecosystem approach to marine and coastal areas and also drew attention to some fundamental issues and principles of fisheries and ocean management and use (WSSD, 2002). While thinking about how to approach this autobiographical essay, I realized that much of my career has been built around the pursuit of several of these principles, in particular:

• The need for effective coordination and cooperation between relevant bodies at all levels;

• Encouragement to implement the ecosystem approach (by 2010!);

• Promotion of integrated, multidisciplinary and multi-sectoral coastal and ocean management.

I do not know whether it is because I started my career in freshwater fisheries, where external impacts are usually strong and obvious, or because I grew up in a developing country where urgent human needs cannot be ignored, or simply because of a natural curiosity about whatever I see around me, but these principles intuitively made sense to me long before I saw them formally listed in that document.

My career has been somewhat unconventional and I need to give a short account of the professional changes in my life to help to put the rest of the paper into perspective. My first degree was obtained in 1973 at the University of Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia), with a double major in zoology and geology. After graduation, I spent several months teaching at a local high school before landing a job early in 1975 as a fisheries research officer with the national Department of National Parks and Wildlife Management, working on Lake Kariba, at that time the largest man-made lake in the world. I used that research to complete a MPhil degree, also with the University of Zimbabwe (Cochrane, 1978). During this period, the civil war in Zimbabwe was escalating and like all other young, white males I was drafted by the minority government into that unjust and unnecessary war, albeit it in the relatively light role of patrolling the waters of Lake Kariba as a police reservist. After just over 2 years in what could, under more just and peaceful circumstances, have been a dream job, my wife Hilary and I opted to leave the country. While in many ways it was going from the frying pan into the fire, the only option that we could find was for me to take up a teaching position in Pretoria, South Africa, the country of my birth and then under the apartheid regime.

I started teaching high school mathematics and biology at St Alban’s College in Pretoria in May 1977, enjoyed it and stayed on for more than 4 years. I came to admire teachers for their organization, commitment and professionalism and, to this day, consider the profession to be one of the most perversely under-rated careers there is. While there, I completed a post-graduate diploma in education by correspondence through the University of South Africa (UNISA) that included courses on the history of education, educational psychology and a rather uninspiring course on the philosophy of education. They, plus some courses that I subsequently undertook under a theological umbrella, helped both to broaden my view of the world and my academic interests.

In 1981, I successfully applied for a position at the National Institute of Water Research at the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), also in Pretoria. I was placed in a team of researchers studying phosphorous cycling in a hypertrophic lake, Hartbeespoort Dam. That research provided the basis for my PhD research, and I subsequently obtained the degree through the University of the Witwatersrand (Cochrane, 1985).

That was another good job that could have been the foundation of a solid and rewarding career, but the politics of southern Africa provided another twist, although this time of my own choosing. There is not the space to go into details, but in May 1986, disturbed by the on-going apartheid policies in the country and inspired by the growing opposition, including by some church bodies and many religious leaders, I took up a full time position with the Anglican Church in Pretoria, where I was given the portfolio for “justice and reconciliation”. While I have never regretted jumping into this position, it was challenging and difficult and after 18 months I withdrew, emotionally drained, and returned to science. The lessons I learned from that experience, including about myself and my own limitations, but more importantly about the ease with which people can find excuses to mistreat others and the human need not just for food, water and security but also for dignity, respect, justice and opportunity for self-fulfilment, have served me well in life and work since then.

After an introduction from John Field of the University of Cape Town, who had been an advisor to the project I was working on at CSIR. I was offered a position in what was then the Sea Fisheries Research Institute (SFRI) in Cape Town. I started in December 1988 and had a rich and enjoyable 6 years plus there. I was thoroughly enjoying my job and life in Cape Town, more so because of the progress the country was making towards a democratic and more just nation, and therefore did not unequivocally welcome the invitation from FAO to apply for a position at FAO headquarters in Rome, Italy, that I received in December 1994. Nevertheless, I decided to apply, was offered the position and after much to-ing and fro-ing, Hilary and I decided it was an opportunity we could not miss. I joined the Fisheries and Aquaculture Department of FAO in October 1995 and spent 16 fascinating years there working on a wide variety of subjects with and in many different countries. In 2012, we decided it was time to come home and, since then, I have been living in Cape Town, getting my first taste of working as an academic through a part-time position at the Department of Ichthyology and Fisheries Science, Rhodes University and my first taste of private enterprise as a part-time consultant.

I started my career as what is probably best described as a fisheries ecologist but for the last 15 years at least, I have not really known how to describe what I do, other than something along the lines of fisheries scientist or that I work on fisheries management. Within that evolution, there have been three main threads that have characterized my work. They are: environmental influences on fish productivity (recently including climate change), fisheries management and governance, and the role of politics and policy in fisheries. In combination, they go a long way towards embracing an ecosystem approach to fisheries as it is now understood. I will address each one of these in turn.

Environment and fish productivity

Environmental influences on fish

When I started working on Lake Kariba for the Dept. of National Parks and Wildlife Management, my primary responsibility was to investigate the reasons for the seasonal fluctuations in catches of Limnothrissa miodon (Boulenger) in Lake Kariba. L. miodon, the Lake Tanganyika sardine, had been introduced to Lake Kariba in the 1960s in an attempt to fill a vacant, pelagic niche in the newly formed lake. The species established and spread rapidly and by the time I arrived in the mid-1970s was already supporting a small commercial fishery. Catches showed a marked seasonal fluctuation and my primary task was to explain this and consider the implications for managing the fishery. This project started my career with a wide-angle ecosystem lens: with the help of only a single technician at any one time, we assessed and monitored a range of physical and chemical indicators, chlorophyll, some major zooplankton species as well as the biology and life history of L. miodon (Cochrane, 1978, 1984a). I could not have asked for a better start for an aquatic zoologist with an emerging disciplinary wander-lust.

I continued working on this theme in my next research position at CSIR in Pretoria. I was a member of a team doing research into nutrient cycling and options for reducing the high concentrations of nutrients and improving water quality at Hartbeespoort Dam. My task was to investigate the role of the fish community in phosphorus cycling. One did not have to delve into subtle data series to see the impacts of the ecosystem and environment on the impoverished fish fauna of Hartbeespoort Dam and I wrote several papers and popular articles on the topic (Cochrane, 1984b, 1986a, b).

With this start in ecosystem thinking, it was natural for me to continue along similar lines when I moved to the SFRI and began to delve into the salty waters of the Benguela upwelling system. At that time, there was a lot of global interest in the likely factors driving the inter-annual and decadal-scale variability in sardine and anchovy populations, both nationally and globally. That theme became a focus of my work, as reflected in early papers on, for example, phytoplankton (chlorophyll a) distribution in the southern Benguela and the implications for small pelagic fish (Brown and Cochrane, 1991) and the effects of cannibalism and intraguild predation on anchovy recruitment (Valdes-Szeinveld and Cochrane, 1992). During the same period I published a paper together with Tony Starfield (then at the University of Minnesota) on the potential value of being able to predict recruitment success for the South African anchovy fishery. Using the operational management procedure then being used for setting the annual anchovy TAC and the operating model underlying that procedure as the testing ground, we estimated that the ability to forecast the annual recruitment of anchovy at the start of the fishing season (several months in advance of actual recruitment) would lead to increased catches without increasing the risk to the stock. The magnitude of the increase depended on the accuracy and precision of forecasts (Cochrane and Starfield, 1992). We undertook this study to provide motivation for ongoing research into the drivers of recruitment in small pelagics and to provide a goal for that research.

Since then, other interests and pressures have kept me away from pursuing this theme any further. I also have doubts as to whether we will ever be able to monitor highly variable systems comprehensively enough to be able to forecast recruitment or inter-annual fluctuations in shorter-lived marine fish species with sufficient accuracy and precision to assist in tactical management. In my view, we probably do have a good understanding of the major mechanisms and drivers of fish abundance and productivity in these systems, but the drivers are typically operating at temporal and spatial scales that are too fine for us to be able to monitor accurately. Even if it were feasible to monitor at the required scales, the costs would probably outweigh the social, economic or sustainability benefits unless or until there are major advances in cost-effective technology for such monitoring. An additional interesting question is whether the frequency and intensity of sampling necessary to be able to develop and apply reliable predictive models could have an impact, as an additional driver, on the fish-environment system, leading to an environmental equivalent of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics.

Ecosystem modelling

Being part of a multidisciplinary team looking at phosphorus cycling in Hartbeespoort Dam enriched my study on the fish populations. The work of the team was synthesized and held together through the development of a numerical model of phosphorus cycling in the ecosystem (Cochrane et al., 1987). The development of the model started before I joined CSIR but I quickly became interested in it and before long was given responsibility for coordinating overall model development. When I moved to the SFRI in Cape Town, I initially continued with ecosystem modelling and led the development of a stratified model representing a 1 m² column of water located in St Helena Bay on the west coast of South Africa. The purpose of building the model was to assist in the synthesis of results from a 28-day monitoring programme, encompassing a range of variables from nutrients up the food chain to macro-zooplankton. Basing a model on such a limited data set and period of time was never going to generate major new insights into ecosystem structure or functioning and our primary conclusion from the paper was that the assumption of homogeneity in the distribution of variables in the model contrasted with the ‘patchiness’ of the real system. We concluded that uncertainties and the inevitable limited precision of ecosystem models of this nature meant that they are unlikely to be able to predict biomass or production with any reliability, but such models have a role as hypotheses of the structure and function of systems that can be tested and improved over time (Cochrane et al., 1991).

That was the last opportunity I had to work on ecosystem models while at SFRI, but I did pick-up on them again while at FAO, albeit without being directly involved in any particular models. An interesting activity, undertaken as part of a broader project examining multispecies management, was the organization of an international workshop on the use of ecosystem models to investigate multispecies management strategies (Pitcher and Cochrane, 2002). The workshop focused on Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE) and the proceedings from that event included descriptions of a new Ecosim policy search software designed to identify fishing rates that maximized objective functions for user-defined economic, ecological and social goals. Carl Walters had designed this software specifically for the workshop (Cochrane, 2002; Walters et al., 2002) and it represented, in my view, a valuable step forward in promoting and facilitating the use of ecosystem models in the provision of strategic advice for fisheries management. The fact that EwE was designed by such an eminent person in the field of stock assessment added great weight to the credibility of ecosystem modelling amongst other more conservative and sceptical members of the conventional stock assessment club.

I have not finished with ecosystem models yet and, at the time of writing this, am working with Kelly Ortega-Cisneros a post-doctoral fellow at Rhodes University and Beth Fulton of CSIRO, Australia, on an updated version of an Atlantis model of the southern Benguela upwelling system. There is still debate about the role and value of complex ecosystem models, which inevitably include high uncertainty in their structures, assumptions and parameters, but in my view that are an invaluable tool for understanding and applying an integrated view of social–ecological systems and their components. What’s more, they are fun.

Climate change

I first became interested in the issue of climate change in about 2007. My reasons were twofold. The first was an academic and practical interest while the second was a somewhat cynical realization that a lot of research and development aid funding was being diverted to climate change and that fisheries and aquaculture could lose out if they did not adapt to this shift. It was also clear that the actions required to adapt to the impacts of climate change on fisheries and aquaculture would need to be built on the fundamental requirements of best practice, as captured in, for example, the FAO Code of Conduct (FAO, 1995) and an EAF. Therefore, climate change funding could also facilitate continued progress towards those goals.

I will not give much attention to climate change in this paper because it is now a mainstream topic in fisheries and aquaculture and there is a library of papers and reports on the subject. I will touch on my involvement in the 5th Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), for which I was one of the lead authors on Chapter 7, Food Security and Food Production Systems of Working Group II (Porter et al. 2014). The production of the AR5 was a massive undertaking involving three working groups covering the physical science basis (WGI), adaptation and vulnerability (WGII) and mitigation (WGIII). More than 830 authors contributed to AR5 and it included over 50 chapters (https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/). In such a large exercise, there is a high risk of including erroneous and misleading information in the reports, whether by accident or intention but, based on previous experience, the IPCC had a rigorous process in place to minimize the risks of such problems. This included three opportunities for peer review of all the chapters, a requirement for authors and editors to declare any potential conflicts of interest, and the checking of all sources cited in the chapters. The other overall measure that I found useful was the attempt to ensure that authors and chapters were consistent in their references to uncertainties in any findings and conclusions of AR5. The approach consisted of application of a common framework providing calibrated language for expressing the level of certainty that could be placed in a finding and the level of agreement amongst experts about that finding. Science is rarely cut and dried, and controversy and professional conflict are an essential part of the development and growth of scientific knowledge. For that to happen effectively, however, transparency and reliable peer-review are essential. The seriousness with which the IPCC attempted to address those requirements provides a valuable example for any scientific body providing advice to decision-makers and also for peer-reviewed journals. When a paper, report or recommendation is addressing a controversial issue and could have substantial consequences, reliance on the standard approach of two or three voluntary reviewers (often nominated by authors) is insufficient and a process that includes careful evaluation of conflicts of interest and checking of sources coupled with a thorough and transparent peer-review is necessary to ensure objectivity and reliability.

Another noteworthy aspect of my climate change work at FAO was my membership from 2006 to 2009 on the Scientific Steering Committee of the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Programme (GLOBEC), the origins of which are described by Brian Rothschild in his Food for Thought article (Rothschild, 2015). Manuel Barange, an ex-colleague from my days at SFRI, was the Director of the GLOBEC International Project Office at the time. While the programme as a whole was at times somewhat too academic in its approach for my interests, I welcomed the exposure to the interesting and high level science that was taking place under its auspices. I also welcomed the attempts that were being made in GLOBEC to link social and natural sciences. One output from those attempts was a symposium on World Fisheries: a Social-Ecological Analysis held at FAO in 2008 and jointly organized by GLOBEC, FAO and the European Network of Excellence for Ocean Ecosystems Analysis. This brought together an unusual mix of scientists from various disciplines with a common awareness that fisheries are integrated social-ecological systems and, therefore, that the solutions to understanding and governing these systems will similarly have to traverse the classic disciplinary boundaries (Ommer et al., 2011).

Fisheries management and governance

All of my work from the start of my career has been aimed at management. I do not recall making a conscious decision that this is where I wanted to be in my career but think it stems from desires to be where the action is and for my work to have a practical impact. Many scientists see dedicated applied science as being constraining and of little interest for a “true” scientist. In contrast, I have never been interested in science for the sake of science. In a world challenged by the magnitude and diversity of problems and threats that confront us, it is my view that the major proportion of the human and financial resources that go into science can only be justified if it is directed at addressing those problems and threats and has a reasonable chance of success.

The research I did on Lake Kariba and Hartbeespoort Dam were both directed at informing management but my first serious entry into fisheries management took place at SFRI. I was soon to discover that the scientific interest and demands of trying to understand and guide management and governance exceed anything that hadron colliders and Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatories can provide, at least for me. I will only address one of the publications that I wrote, together with Doug Butterworth, Jose De Oliveira and Beatriz Roél in this field while at SFRI. That paper examined the application of operational management procedures (OMPs) in the South African small pelagic fishery, which targets anchovy Engraulis capensis and sardine Sardinops sagax (Cochrane et al., 1998). The two species are targeted by separate fisheries, one fishing for anchovy primarily for reduction to fish-meal and oil and the other targeting adult sardine primarily for human consumption. The two fisheries are linked through bycatch of juvenile sardine in the anchovy fishery.

The OMPs were developed in consultation with the small pelagic industry, which was appreciated both by the industry and the scientists. The former saw this as an opportunity for their social and economic perspectives to be considered in setting TACs, while the scientists understood that if such concerns were taken into account, without violating the need for sustainability, there would be a greater chance of the resulting scientific recommendations being accepted by the managers and decision-makers and of successful implementation.

At the time of writing the paper, the TAC recommendations had been over-ruled and higher TACs approved by the management authority in five of the 9 years in which a management procedure had been applied (1988–1996). Cochrane et al. (1998) attempted to identify the reasons for this breakdown between science, the industry and managers. The most important reasons proposed in the paper included that (i) unavoidable biological uncertainty reduced the confidence of the stakeholders in the scientific recommendations, (ii) different priorities for different companies in the industry coupled with the political uncertainty in the country at the time were obstacles to industry willingness to buy into a long-term and sustainable management strategy and (iii) the management authority did not provide the strong leadership that was needed to ensure adoption and implementation of a realistic long-term strategy for sustainable use of the resources. While they occur in different guises, these are the same types of problems that have challenged sustainable and responsible use of fisheries around the world.

That work taught me a lot about the interactions between science, management and politics in natural resource use and management. Perhaps the most important lesson was that you can take stakeholders, including authorities and politicians, to the trough of scientific knowledge but you cannot force them to drink. Vested interests (whether for laudable or flawed reasons), external drivers, doubts about the science and other factors can and frequently do overwhelm scientific argument and rationale. Scientists cannot change that but we can help to mitigate those problems by ensuring that scientific results and recommendations are based on the best-available, objective science, are well and clearly presented and, as far as possible, take into account and offer approaches to reconcile stakeholder goals and consider the impacts of important external factors.

With my move to FAO, the nature of my work changed considerably. A feature of working for FAO, at least as a part of the Headquarters staff, is that one is stretched thinly across a wide range of tasks and countries and responsibilities tend to change rapidly. That is both one of the exciting and stimulating aspects of working for FAO but can also be frustrating because one is usually on the fringes, as advisor or facilitator, rather than being directly involved. Nevertheless, I enjoyed and made the most of the diverse opportunities that FAO presented. Nearly all scientists now also face similar problems of being thinly stretched and having to address multiple tasks. I respect the many competing interests and priorities that governments need to face in, for example, food security, healthcare, education, housing and security, but fear that the impacts of the wide-spread cut-backs on resources for science and scientific capacity will incur serious costs now and in the future. In countries and times when resources for science were plentiful, if scientific advice was required on a new problem, the standard approach would be to set up a tailor-made research project of appropriate scales to generate or supplement that advice. The research project on nutrient cycling in Hartbeespoort Dam was an example of this. In a similar case today, a common, much cheaper approach would be to put 10 or 20 scientists and stakeholders together in a workshop for a few days with instructions to come up with an answer. Cutting costs must be one of the key drivers of this common weakening of the scientific base for decision-making but the underlying reasons may be more complex than that and probably include a widespread failure by those in power to recognize the nature and value of high quality science.

This second, short-cut approach undoubtedly has an important role to play but it is typically rushed and relies entirely on existing capital, in the form of available scientific knowledge. Importantly, it does not generate new knowledge, apart from, perhaps, improved synthesis. Such a workshop may generate quick and reasonable or even good results in some cases but the reliability of the conclusions will inevitably be determined by the quality of the available knowledge, its relevance to the question under consideration, the expertise of the participants and the time they can allocate to the task. Further, as time goes by much of the knowledge capital we currently have will deteriorate in quality and relevance unless recharged and updated. If the world as a whole takes too many short-cuts of this type, we are likely to be making more and more ill-informed and costly bad decisions as time goes by. Without getting into a debate about pure and applied science, a high priority must be given by governments and the private sector to ensuring sufficient funding, capacity and time for effective and relevant applied research to address the important issues confronting the world.

My responsibilities at FAO largely fell within two categories, referred to as normative and field work. My field responsibilities centred on the provision of technical and scientific advice on resource management to FAO member countries, of which I was given the pleasant task of being responsible for my home turf of the south east Atlantic (Angola, Namibia and South Africa) and the western central Atlantic, typically abbreviated in FAO circles as the WECAFC region, encompassing the Caribbean island states and mainland countries with a border on the central Atlantic, from the northern parts of Brazil to the southern regions of the USA. The more substantial and sustained activities in which I was involved in the WECAF area centred on working with the fisheries departments of the countries of the Brazil-Guianas shelf (Brazil, French Guiana, Surinam, Guyana, Venezuela and Trinidad and Tobago) on assessment and management of their shrimp and groundfish fisheries and with the 23 countries of the western central Atlantic that have fisheries for the Caribbean spiny lobster Panulirus argus. This was stimulating and enjoyable work, albeit not ground-breaking in a scientific sense. Much of it was directed at capacity-building in simple methods of stock assessment and the use of scientific information for management decisions, as well as encouraging cooperation between countries in the assessment and management of shared resources. The actual impacts or outcomes of work such as this are difficult to measure and are affected by many external factors beyond the control of the specific departments and agencies that we were working with. This is one of the big challenges of any development work and, all too often, the time and resources put into development aid projects are little more than drops in the ocean in relation to the full needs of countries and regions. For development aid to have a real impact, it needs to provide sufficient resources and time to address fundamental causes of shortcomings, not just the symptoms. Current efforts could be a lot more effective with a sustained, coordinated and integrated approach from all the donors, rather than the fragmented and sometimes competitive short-term approaches that tend to be the norm.

Most of the work in which I was involved in the WECAF region is published only in FAO reports. While most of these are accessible on the FAO website, they are largely out of view of the typical scientist. One exception is a paper my FAO colleague Bisessar Chakalall and I published on the management of the Caribbean spiny lobster (Cochrane and Chakalall, 2001). The species supported, and probably still does, one of the most economically valuable fisheries in the region. Drawing on the assessments of the stock undertaken through the Western Central Atlantic Fisheries Commission (WECAFC), the paper reported the findings that the resource was over-exploited over much of its range, the quality of the data being collected by most countries was poor, and that the technical measures relied on by many countries, mainly minimum sizes and closed seasons, were not effectively regulating fishing mortality. We recommended that most countries needed to reduce fishing effort and to implement stronger technical measures, and emphasized the need to improve cooperation and coordination between the countries fishing for this shared resource. It appears that many of the challenges in management that we referred to persist (WECAFC, 2015), almost certainly for the reasons given in the previous paragraph.

One of the most successful field projects that I was involved with while at FAO was a joint venture between the Global Environment Facility (GEF) Benguela Current Large Marine Ecosystem programme and FAO that examined the feasibility of implementing ecosystem approaches to fisheries management in Angola, Namibia and South Africa (Cochrane et al., 2007, 2009). For each of the fisheries addressed, we started with a scoping exercise, conducted through a participatory workshop, that identified and prioritized key research and management issues using a risk-based approach pioneered in Australia (FAO, 2003). Those preliminary exercises were invaluable in helping participants in the workshops to understand what EAF was all about and why it was so important. This in itself helped to establish EAF as the framework for fisheries management in the region, but another reason the project was so successful was that WWF South Africa, represented by Deon Nel and Samantha Petersen, participated in the project from the beginning. WWF South Africa quickly saw the value of EAF and the tools being used in the project and helped to facilitate some of the subsequent workshops in the project. The organization has since been a major driver in promoting implementation of EAF in South Africa and Namibia (Petersen et al., 2015). The time was right for this project and the countries had the capacity and interest to take EAF seriously, but this example also demonstrates the value of champions in identifying and facilitating positive change.

At the same time, I was also engaged in normative work for FAO. This included contributing to several FAO Technical Guidelines for Responsible Fisheries covering fisheries management, EAF, ecolabelling of fish and fisheries products, best practices in ecosystem modelling, and marine protected areas and fisheries. The development of these guidelines, and many other facets of my work at FAO, helped to broaden my perspectives and also involved working with and learning from leading fisheries scientists from around the world.

An observation that gradually grew on me through all of this is that fisheries scientists frequently have an excessively strong influence on fisheries management. This is because their advice and influence is typically not balanced by equivalent input from other perspectives and on other important aspects of a fishery, in particular social, economic and governance considerations. That is not usually the fault of the fisheries scientists but caused by weaknesses in the management and decision-making sections of fisheries departments, largely a result of the widespread failure of countries to recognize fisheries management as a complex function that requires high level, professional oversight. My subjective view is that the problem is getting worse rather than better, driven by the same reductions in funding and priority referred to earlier in relation to science. Again, there are exceptions, but the consequence of this widespread failure to recognize the nature and complexity of fisheries management is that the people doing the job are often unable to understand the scientific advice and its uncertainties or to evaluate it in the context of their overall mandate. This, in turn, tends to lead to one of two scenarios. In the first, scientists have the excess influence referred to above while the second option, which is even worse, is that the managers ignore or give inadequate attention to the scientific advice they do receive. Neither of these two scenarios provides a reliable, integrating platform for good decision-making and action. If the countries of the world are to live up to the various international commitments to sustainability that they have made in recent decades, they need to ensure that fisheries management is recognized and implemented as a specialized and demanding task that must be overseen by dedicated, competent specialists.

The impact of scientists that have been employed by specific interest groups to work on their behalf, such as fishing industry bodies and conservation NGOs, can be positive if well-managed, as their participation can strengthen scientific input and help to ensure that the problems and questions are considered from different perspectives. However, the default assumption with such scientists must be that they are representing a vested interest and therefore that their scientific objectivity could be compromised. In order to ensure objectivity under such circumstances it is essential that there is an overall balance in scientific influence across the different interests (and issues) and that in cases of doubt or conflict, there is recourse to reliable, independent scientific opinion, for example from an independent panel of experts. Decision-makers also need to be made aware that not all science is equal and to insist on objective, reliable information and advice in making decisions.

These observations on weaknesses at the level of fisheries management led me to assemble a series of chapters from leading experts on core aspects of fisheries management and to publish it as a FAO Technical Paper entitled A Fishery Manager’s Guidebook (Cochrane, 2002). The publication was aimed at contributing to capacity-development in fisheries management. Working at FAO meant that I had the flexibility to undertake a task like that while the FAO stamp and distribution network meant that many leading scientists and practitioners saw it as an opportunity and a service to contribute to the compilation. Several years later, Serge Garcia and I assembled an updated and expanded version jointly published by FAO and Wiley–Blackwell (Cochrane and Garcia, 2009). The book consisted of updated chapters by the same authors from the original and a number of new chapters that enriched the updated version considerably. The book was aimed primarily at fisheries managers and practioners and I do not know how much, if any, influence it may have had on that audience. Recently, though, I was very pleased to read of it being referred to by Fikret Berkes in the preface to his book on coasts for people (Berkes, 2015) as a “landmark…., which expanded horizons from biological management to multi-disciplinary management”. That statement reassured me that we had achieved at least part of our goal.

My experiences in the Caribbean, particularly with the multispecies shrimp and groundfish fisheries on the Brazil-Guianas shelf, also served to highlight the limitations and inaccessibility for many data poor fisheries and fishery scientists of most of the standard approaches to stock assessment, which are usually designed around data-rich, single species assessments. A recent study by Aksnes and Browman (2016) showed that the focus of attention may be even more skewed than that. They found that publications from individual countries give emphasis to species of particular interest to those countries but did not cover a number of commercially important species and that there is little published research on species important to less developed countries. During my time at FAO, I spoke to a number of leading stock assessment people and tried to talk them into the task of developing reliable methods for assessing data poor fisheries and stocks, including multi-species fisheries. I would not mention any of their names: top stock assessment scientists tend to be an irascible lot and spout reams of digits when provoked, but none showed any serious interest. I have subsequently been pleased to see the emergence of broad approaches such as the risk-based framework of the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC, 2014), offering an effective and practical approach for assessment of data poor fisheries.

On the same theme, Neil Andrew, Ana Parma and I also wrote a paper addressing the problems of managing small-scale fisheries. We differentiated between three different levels, of management from primary to tertiary (Cochrane et al., 2011). Primary fisheries management is the only realistic approach in many small-scale fisheries of relatively low economic value and would typically be aimed at achieving social and ecological resilience, sustainability, food security and poverty reduction. At the other end of the spectrum, tertiary fisheries management uses all relevant best practices and tools to achieve productive and healthy fisheries. The key difference between those two extremes is the extent to which assessment and management can reduce uncertainties and strive for optimal target reference points (tertiary), rather than being constrained by uncertainty simply to avoiding crossing undesirable limit reference points (primary). The aims of our paper were to encourage application of primary management in more small-scale fisheries in order to achieve sustainability but also to clarify that application of primary management requires stringent application of the precautionary approach in the face of high uncertainty, which means lost social and ecological benefits compared with the potential benefits if there was less uncertainty.

Politics and policy in fisheries

Policy and politics mean very different things but there are strong feedback loops between them, and I am addressing both in this section. In fact, I am using this section as something of a holdall for a number of interests and activities that go beyond science and management.

Natural resource use is never far from politics. In South Africa in the 1990s, it was clear that the transition to a truly democratic country would, amongst other consequences, have major implications for marine fisheries in South Africa. Under apartheid, the government and the white-dominated fishing industry were in a cosy and comfortable relationship but that would soon have to be shattered in order to achieve equitable access to the country’s fishing resources. In 1991, the African National Congress (ANC) declared in its policy document, the Reconstruction and Development Programme, that “Marine resources must be managed and controlled for the benefit of all South Africans…. The democratic government must assist people to have access to these resources” (African National Congress, 1994).

Fisheries research in South Africa at the time consisted almost entirely of the natural sciences. There was, therefore, going to be very little policy guidance available for the new democratic government other than on the resources themselves. In a paper published in Naga in 1995, I wrote that “there has been very little research into the social and economic consequences and potential of the fisheries, and decision-makers will have to make extensive use of experiences gained elsewhere in the world” (Cochrane, 1995). I managed to persuade the director of SFRI that we needed to undertake a review of the different options for allocating access to fisheries resources and was tasked with convening and chairing a mixed group of scientists, administrators and a fishing industry representative to write a report on international experiences in access rights (Cochrane et al., 1995). We completed the review at a good stage in the political process because at about this time a formal Fisheries Policy Development Committee (FPDC) was established. The FPDC created an Access Rights Technical Committee, chaired by George Branch of the University of Cape Town, to examine the options available for broadening access to remedy the injustices of the past. Our report proved a valuable source of information for the committee (Branch et al., 1996; Cochrane and Payne, 1998). Since that time, large strides have been made in establishing equitable access to fisheries in South Africa, but more still needs to be done. Not all scientists have an interest in or want to be involved in the wider political world around their speciality and it is not necessary for all to be engaged. It is essential, though, not to be isolated and that there is strong two-way communication between science and the world in which it is embedded. Without that, on the one hand the science is likely to be irrelevant to that wider world and, on the other hand, decisions will still be made in the world but with far higher risk of failure without the benefit of sound and relevant scientific input.

In 1998, I was participating in a discussion with Serge Garcia and John Caddy of FAO when the subject of a workshop to be held in Cape Town later that year came up. The workshop was to review the validity of the CITES criteria for listing commercially exploited aquatic species in CITES Appendix I and II and was to be held in Cape Town, back-to-back with an ICES meeting to be held there. I only heard the word Cape Town and the possibility of a trip home and immediately volunteered to attend, together with Serge. That simple action set me on a course that took up a considerable proportion of the next 12 years and, while frequently interesting, stimulating and sometimes fun, was also frustrating and ultimately disappointing. I have recently written-up the scientific and policy details of that journey and published the paper in Marine Policy (Cochrane 2015). The paper describes the history of the 2004 revision of the CITES criteria for listing species in the Appendices, which included the FAO science-based recommendations, and the subsequent decisions by the Parties at CITES Conferences of the Parties (CoPs) on proposals to list commercially exploited aquatic species from 2002 to 2010. The revised criteria and the analysis of proposals by FAO expert panels has proved of some value but also turned out to be another source of conflict between the staunch pro-listing and anti-listing lobbies. The former group found a way to circumvent the FAO-recommended changes to the criteria when they wanted to do so and the latter group was often able to assemble enough votes to block listing decisions to which they objected, whether or not in accordance with the scientific analysis. The revised, science-based criteria and the review of proposals by the FAO expert panels probably have had a positive impact on decisions on listing proposals by CITES parties. Nevertheless, the paper concluded that there had probably been little real interest by many of the countries and active NGOs in the role of science to improve decision-making and decisions. Instead, those with strong views on whether or not CITES has an important role to play in fisheries management went along with the scientific “game” as long as it suited their pre-determined positions but quickly abandoned adherence to scientific recommendations when it did not. I also proposed that if the Convention is to be used effectively for the purpose originally intended, the focus should really be on the expected effectiveness of a CITES listing for the species under consideration. In practice, however, that factor has received surprisingly little attention over the years.

Cochrane (2015) was not intended as an indictment of CITES as a convention but rather a reflection of the failings and limitations of international diplomacy and decision-making. Similar dogmatic short-sightedness can be found in other examples of conflicts between conservation, fisheries and other users. One of those is the on-going fracas over the appropriate use and effectiveness of marine protected areas in conservation and fisheries management, including the value of setting global targets for the percentage of a country’s exclusive economic zone to be proclaimed as MPAs (Cochrane et al., 2008). Another example, at a considerably more complex level, is the difficulty being experienced in implementing an ecosystem-based approach to governance of ocean use (EBM). In a review of progress in implementation across a number of case studies, Cochrane et al. (2014) concluded that there were two inter-related obstacles to implementation. These are the vested interests of the different stakeholder groups, which are unlikely to buy into integrated approaches if they think that they are better served by the existing approach, even though sectorally fragmented, and practical problems such as the time and cost involved in trying to reach agreement amongst different stakeholders. As so often, political will and strong and wise leadership will be necessary to move forward on rational and effective use of MPAs and implementation of EBM.

These examples, and many other disputes in fisheries management, reflect a common trait of scientists to be pre-occupied with their own disciplines, interests and theories rather than stepping back and recognizing and confronting the bigger picture and the full set of issues and challenges. Such limited views and the inward-looking controversies they generate can then spill over to, or confuse, the users of science such as governments and NGOs leading to sub-optimal or incorrect decision-making. Is this tendency to look at the world through a narrow lens an intrinsic characteristic of our species or a consequence of our training and education? I suspect that the latter is, at least, highly influential and that more open, trans-disciplinary approaches to tertiary education (without sacrificing rigorous, formal scientific methods) would make a significant difference in encouraging people to avoid seeking comfort in specialized, scientific silos and rather to see and seek to address issues in their overall context. Frustration at this inefficiency has influenced a number of the papers and book chapters that I have written over the years. In a paper based on a presentation at the very ICES conference that enticed me into going to Cape Town and into the discords of CITES, I argued against the still prevalent faith that pursuing more and more precision in stock assessment, and more complexity in fisheries management, would lead to improvements in sustainable use. A key conclusion of that paper was that managers and scientists should undertake evaluations of their management systems in relation to the objectives for the fishery. This should include assessment of the actual performance of the range of management measures, processes and activities making up the system as a first step in designing an optimal structure and approach for their needs. In many cases, it was argued, this would probably lead to a change in management towards simpler, less intensive and less ambitious systems (Cochrane, 1999).

In 1992, I had attended the International Symposium on Management Strategies for Exploited Fish Populations in Anchorage, Alaska, where I met Tony Pitcher, with whom I shared a common interest through our work on Lake Kariba. That meeting marked the start of a productive professional relationship including, for me, a close association with the Fisheries Centre at University British Columbia for close on 10 years. One component of that was an invitation to deliver the third Larkin lecture, named after Dr Peter Larkin, the eminent Canadian fisheries biologist. The invitation gave me an opportunity and impetus to look further and wider into the challenges facing fisheries. The title of the talk that I delivered and the resulting paper (the first paper to be published in the new journal Fish and Fisheries, pioneered by Tony) was “Reconciling sustainability, economic efficiency and equity in fisheries: the one that got away?” (Cochrane, 2000). That broad theme remains my major professional preoccupation. The paper proposed that the primary factors giving rise to failures in fisheries to achieve balanced objectives included high biological uncertainty, conflicts between the long-term goal of sustainability and shorter-term social and economic priorities, loosely and poorly defined objectives, and failures in key institutional arrangements in particular concerning access rights and participation by stakeholders in management. These are elements in the complex systems of fisheries and the paper argued that the complexity provides multiple opportunities for vested interest groups within the system to manoeuvre in pursuing their own interests. There are no easy solutions to the conflict over resources, for whatever purposes, but a pre-requisite is a genuine willingness by stakeholders to achieve commonly agreed upon objectives.

I took this theme further at the fourth World Fisheries Congress (WFC) in Vancouver in 2004 where I had been asked to speak on “What Should We Care About When Attempting to Reconcile Fisheries with Conservation?” The presentation and subsequent paper were something of a patchwork as I tried to encompass biological, social, economic and psychological factors that needed to be taken into account in efforts to achieve reconciliation between conservation and sustainable use. It also led me into dabbling in the fascinating and important world of prospect theory, which considers what influences us when we make decisions that involve risk (Kahneman and Tversky, 2000). In the paper, I concluded that “Piecemeal attempts to achieve reconciliation seem inevitably doomed to failure” and that “the basic problems in fisheries do not lie in inadequate science or technology; they lie in human needs and human behaviour” (Cochrane, 2008).

My presentation at the WFC, a plenary keynote address, received a mixed reception. The broad supra-disciplinary approach and my attempts to identify the fundamental challenges in fisheries were welcomed by some but in the closing plenary discussion of the Congress I was criticized by a number of social scientists. Their complaints did not seem to be primarily on the actual information, results and conclusions that I had presented but appeared to be more about indignation that a “natural scientist” had presumed to enter what they perceived to be their turf. This was one manifestation of the still pervasive “clash of different professional traditions” noted in the Endnote of the Conference proceedings (Hart et al., 2006). This clash is not ubiquitous and I have worked with many social and natural scientists with much more open-minds but sadly, territoriality and a preference for disciplinary silos seem to be the norm rather than the exception across all disciplines. I put a lot of the blame for this on our typically rigid and disciplinary-based university structures, which have an enormous influence on the ideas of emerging, young professionals and, again, the starting point for resolving the problem surely lies in breaking down those rigid walls and encouraging open, curious and mutually respectful minds. Perhaps this is changing as there are encouraging signs of the entrenched silos being increasingly breached at individual and institutional level and, hopefully, increasing acceptance of multi and inter-disciplinary science and pursuing systems approaches to problems (Symes and Hoefnagel, 2010; Berkes, 2015 and the 2016 ICES symposium on understanding marine socio-ecological systems—http://www.ices.dk/news-and-events/symposia/MSEAS/Pages/MSEAS.aspx). Nevertheless, we still have a long way to go if we are going to develop sciences and scientists well-prepared to take on the increasingly complex and inter-connected challenges we are confronting.

Concluding remarks

My return to South Africa in 2012 has put me back into a developing country environment. It is a challenging time in South Africa but, as so often with this country, it also serves as a microcosm and window on global injustices and challenges that are sometimes too easily ignored in the fenced-in security of many developed countries. Since my return, I have largely given attention to local issues, which was one of the reasons why I chose to leave FAO earlier than the compulsory retirement age, but I have tried to retain some international engagement as well. I have been able to get involved in a range of activities straddling different disciplines and encompassing research, such as the international GULLS project (Global learning for local solutions: reducing vulnerability of marine-dependent coastal communities), and management and policy advice, including several reviews of topical management issues in South African fisheries. I am enjoying them all but collectively they reinforce my opinion that the path to sustainable and productive fisheries, undertaken for the greatest societal benefit, requires overcoming much bigger hurdles in governance and society as a whole. Where it has been possible to climb those hurdles, at least partially, it has been possible to make progress in rebuilding and sustaining fisheries and providing better protection for biodiversity. The USA and Australia probably provide the best examples of that but again, they have to be seen as largely closed islands of prosperity in a needy world. If, and I see it as a very big “if” with human nature and behaviour the way they are, we can spread the prosperity currently enjoyed by a few and generate more to bring the entire world to an acceptable and sustainable level of prosperity, we could see those localized successes being elevated to a global level. If science is to contribute to equitable and sustainable development and be valued and prioritized as an essential source of guidance and advice, we need to develop and adapt our approaches in a way that builds on the good and fundamental attributes of the scientific method but broadens the sights and scope of science and scientists to encompass the complex and integrated world we are studying.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Jan Beyer of the Technical University of Denmark for suggesting that I contribute a Food for Thought article and Howard Browman, editor-in-chief of the Journal and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript.

References

Author notes