The importance of complexities of scale and context in fisheries research and management

Abstract

Problems with spatial (geographical) and temporal scales in fisheries research and management have become better known over the past few years. However, technological and some institutional scales, along with essential contextual dimensions (policy, intellectual, and academic) are also important. We discuss fisheries management in general with respect to these matters and their interactions. We also provide recommendations for addressing these issues, both in general and with particular reference to local fisheries. These are: (1) recognize the importance of fishers’ knowledge across all scales; (2) recognize fishers’ motivations, especially at the local/community scale; (3) thus expand the nature of the information used for management; (4) match the spatial management scales to those of the fish and the fishers; (5) recognize the limitations of large institutions to manage fisheries at local scales; (6) recognize the limits of time-series data; and (7) develop better indicators for fishing effort.

Introduction

Complexities in the interactions between temporal and spatial scales are now generally understood to be major impediments to improving fisheries management, even though the way to resolve them remains a key question (e.g. Peterson and Dunham, 2010). What is less well recognized in fisheries research and management are the scale issues and associated contextual dimensions that—on their own and through their interactions in time and space—make successful fisheries (i.e. seen to be equitable for both fish and fishers) management even more complex. Geographic and temporal scale issues have been recognized more often in terrestrial systems, perhaps because their boundaries are readily observable (e.g. Cumming et al., 2006; Kearney and Hilborn, 2022); fisheries are more difficult to deal with in this respect. However, issues of scale underpin many fisheries research and managerial actions although they often go unnoticed: the result is the failure to realize that many situations are likely to be operating at several scales, including conflicting or mismatching geographical, temporal, technological, and institutional scales. This is made even more difficult by the interaction between these scalar issues and the important contextual dimensions of policy, intellectual, and academic matters: fisheries management is, after all, fundamentally about understanding and managing people’s interactions with nature, not just fish populations.

Here, we examine scale issues that can inhibit or promote the successful management of fisheries, along with the contextual dimensions of any management operations that can affect outcomes. We do this because researchers and managers need to recognize when one or more scalar and/or contextual issues are in play and/or possibly in conflict. There is also the need to identify important linkages across scales, ranging from local to global. Only then can scientists and managers understand fisheries and their management adequately, recognizing which scale(s) should be focussed upon while paying attention to cross-scale linkages and contextual dimensions. Such an approach, while more complicated than those currently in use, will deal more effectively with major challenges such as declining fish stocks, biodiversity conservation, and global climate change, and also avoid “missed opportunities and unintended consequences” (Chaplin-Kramer et al., 2022).

What is “scale”?

Scale, in this context, is a range of units (either ordinal or nominal) that forms a standard system for measuring or grading something. The ranges involved can be considerable. Geographical scales can vary from the atmospheric and global (e.g. Miller et al., 2010) to the local. Temporal scales can vary from millennia to decades to a day or less. Technology is also scalar in the sense that it deals with a range of vessel and gear sizes, for example, all of which have different implications for management. Institutional scales include large and small governance organizations (often embedded within formal governmental structures thus imposing another range of scales) and can include large and small business enterprises. Scales can also intersect: business, for example, operates in long- and short-term temporal cycles (as Kondratieff, 1935 noted many years ago), while functioning at various geographical scales.

The contexts in which fisheries activities take place are, of course, non-measurable in the metrical sense and so are discussed in this paper not as scales, but as contextual dimensions. The point is that it is necessary to recognize explicitly whatever potentially important scales, contextual dimensions, and their interactions, are involved in the marine issue being studied (see, for example, Perry and Sumaila, 2007) as well as recognizing how these interact. This will help researchers and managers identify how widely their work covers any given issue and hence what they may not have included, or thought about, thus leading to further consideration. The work of fisheries scholars may range from transdisciplinary to inter- or multi-disciplinary to disciplinary or even sub-disciplinary scales (Perry and Ommer, 2003). Intellectual dimensions should incorporate the different motive-driven types of knowledge gained by all types of fishers (not just local ones—see Paterson, 2015 for a deep sea example), professional marine scientists, and government scientists.

Scale concepts in social-ecological approaches to fisheries

Social-ecological fisheries research comprises studies of communities of fishers and their interdependent communities of fish at a range of scales. It is, however, a particularly important focus for local fisheries, one that is still inadequately recognized (Berkes, 2011). The nature of such interdependent systems is also at the heart of problems with the management of local fisheries, since they are particularly prone to mismatches in the scales of environmental variation, fish behaviour, and habitats, as well as social organizational scales, including those of the institutions responsible for their management (Cumming et al., 2006). Recent studies have begun to address issues of scale (often geographical, e.g. Ovitz and Johnson, 2019) in such fisheries, and this has brought to light the narrow perspective of much current fisheries policy and its application in fisheries management globally, nationally, regionally, and locally. Such studies illustrate the kinds of gaps and/or mismatches in scholarship that lie behind policy and management matters. For example, Kuparinen et al. (2016) have shown that the productivity and resilience of Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) in Norway can differ at spatial scales that are smaller than traditional stock management boundaries. Chevallier et al. (2021) have described how the management system for small-scale benthic fisheries in Chile was not able to accommodate the heterogeneity of their fisheries. Indeed the overall problem of scale mismatches has hindered the pursuit of fruitful ways forward that would improve fisheries research and management at all levels in a changing and uncertain world (De Young et al., 1999). Below we provide examples of the various kinds of scales and complexities discussed above, noting that a clear understanding of these issues would improve all fisheries management.

(1) Spatial (Geographical) scale: Mismatches between biological, fishing, and governance scales have been increasingly explored in relation to geographical scales, for low mobility benthic species such as sea urchins (e.g. Johnson et al., 2012; Ouréns et al., 2015) as well as for more wide-ranging species such as Atlantic cod, Gadus morhua (Kerr et al., 2014). A model of how processes in ocean physics and biology, fisheries, and fishing communities can interact and overlap at typical ranges of temporal and spatial scales is presented in Figure 1. While showing that scale complexities are endemic to fisheries, it fails to reveal the motivational drivers involved in fishers’ behaviours, or to indicate that local fishers in particular are embedded in fishing communities and thus may be motivated by community economic as well as marine matters when out fishing. For example, fishers will often target particular species because of market demand, or (try to) avoid other species because of by-catch limitations. Like fishing corporations, who are interested in data and analyses that can be of financial benefit to them, local businesses are also so motivated. Of course, some of the human activities in   Figure 1 may conflict, and they may also require different levels of environmental detail, if good fisheries management is to be ensured; these will also differ between large enterprises (important for employment) and small-scale independent fish harvesters (important for local communities), the latter depending on fine-grained local knowledge that may go back a long way in time—that is small spatial scales but large temporal scales.

Understanding such environmental and human complexities in the context of fisheries, began with the work of Berkes and others (e.g. Berkes and Folke, 1998; see also Colding and Barthel, 2019), who developed the concept of social-ecological systems that emphasized human–marine ecosystem reciprocal interactions. In an important 2011 paper, Berkes noted that “the delineation between social and ecological systems is artificial and arbitrary” and that “restoring unity” in managing marine fisheries is necessary and will be achieved through reconnecting the “natural science, social science, and humanities perspectives”, reconciling the various disciplines as part of the process (Berkes, 2011, p. 9)—a contextual scale issue that we turn to later. As an approach, social-ecological analysis is now being used more, but is not yet fully accepted and in general use, which is unfortunate since it is a good way of coming to grips with the interdependency of people and the marine ecosystem (Ommer, 2007; Stephenson et al., 2018) at a variety of geographical and temporal scales. Social-ecological systems are, of course, hugely complex, but they are central to the evolving state of global fisheries. By definition, they require interdisciplinary approaches and environmental awareness, as demonstrated in work on justice in fisheries management by Coward et al. (2000) and by Ommer et al. (2011).

(2) Temporal scale: A second scale problem is that of temporal scale mismatches, such as that manifested by the “shifting base line syndrome” that Pauly (1995) described and that was explored in the Coasts Under Stress research program (Ommer, 2007). Schijns et al. (2021) modelled the northern cod population off Newfoundland and Labrador, Eastern Canada, using information on catches over the period 1508–2019. Their work, following important earlier work by Hutchings (1996), showed what happens when analyses of trends are started at a time that is selected on a non-scientific basis, but on convenience or ease of attaining records. The result is a timeline whose trend may be misleading and will not remain consistent over different time spans. Fortunately, ways of combining information from the western scientific tradition with local and indigenous knowledge are now being used to construct longer time series and time series for data-poor species (e.g. Eckert et al., 2018). Even here, however, analysts must always be aware of the consequences of arbitrary starting points of time trends in non-stationary statistical systems such as fisheries. Fishing down the food web (Pauly et al., 1998) and its variations such as fishing through the food web (Essington et al., 2006) are corollaries, through hierarchical scales, of the problems of taking too short a temporal view of fishing impacts.

(3) Technological scale: Interactions between local and large scales are clearly seen in the comparison of small-scale fisheries and high-seas fishing fleets. The former are often defined as small, traditional fishing craft equipped with low-tech gear requiring labour-intensive fishing methods, although that can be too simplistic (Smith and Basurto, 2019). The latter use larger ocean-going vessels, are usually bigger with multiple types of gear, have longer self-sustaining ranges on the open ocean, and can therefore fish across multiple ecosystems and national boundaries (e.g. Song et al., 2017). Interactions between local and large scales can occur in small-scale fisheries, but such interactions are complex and not always obvious to managers. One serious problem of this kind of technological scale issue was evidenced in the Kirby Report on the Newfoundland Atlantic Groundfish Fishery (Kirby, 1983). The Report thought the inshore fishery was over-subsidized since it was not taking all its quotas. Inshore fishers, however, complained bitterly that they couldn't catch their quotas, because high sea trawlers had left behind insufficient fish for inshore fishers to catch.

High-seas fishery vessels, it must be remembered, individually generate significant fishing effort relative to smaller (mid-shore) vessels or small (inshore) vessels whose effort per vessel is significantly less. The implication for management of these different intensities of effort is that technological scale must be recognized and accounted for. Said otherwise, fishery managers should not be thinking in terms of “too many fishers chasing too few fish” but in terms of “too much effort chasing too few fish”.

The collapse of the groundfish fishery in the NW Atlantic, and the shift to (and subsequent declining trend of) shrimp, lobster, and crab in that area (Shrank and Roy, 2013), show how these newer interactions work together. The shift to new fisheries in new places has led to increased production costs and new occupational health risks for people. When combined with stock recovery failures, overfishing new “under-utilized” and poorly understood target species has led to ultimately fishing down the trophic levels. This process also pertains to open ocean mesopelagic fisheries (cf. St. John et al., 2016). Human activities impact the natural world and vice versa: that is, what people end up doing to the marine ecosystems upon which they depend can either improve or worsen both human and natural ecosystem conditions (e.g. Perry et al., 2011). In the Newfoundland context, for example, new fisheries have produced fewer fishers using the same or greater fishing effort, because technology has become the key variable, not the number of workers. The result has been fishers and fishing families migrating out of the region, leaving declining communities (e.g. Fowler and Etchegary, 2013) that, in the face of continued human and biological risks, become increasingly mired in social inequality and poverty. It is not a pretty picture, but it is an accurate portrayal of what happens when scientific analysis neglects the impact of technological scale mismatches on community reality.

(4) Institutional scales: Some institutions involved in fisheries governance also exist at a range of scales, from small (e.g. local fishers’ cooperatives), to large (e.g. national government agencies). Here again, institutional scales often interact with spatial, temporal, and technical scale issues: small local cooperatives may manage fisheries at local spatial scales in a manner that may be appropriate for relatively sedentary species such as sea urchins (e.g. Johnson et al., 2012), but inappropriate for wide-ranging species such as tunas or salmonids.

However, contexts are always important. They are the frameworks inside which social-ecological systems function. We look at several contextual dimensions, starting with the institutional policy realm where intellectual scales are often mismatched.

(5) Intellectual scales: Mismatches exist in the policy realm, for example, between government policy and local livelihood needs (Capistrano and Charles, 2012). A good example is found in a study of northern abalone (Haliotis kamschatkana) in northern British Columbia, Canada. Lee et al. (2019) found that the principles of reciprocity and proprietorship of fishing areas practised by native peoples aligned with the resilience principles of the Canadian federal government but did not align with the centralized decision-making and region-wide management policies of the national agency. They concluded that indigenous resource governance and stewardship practices—generated over millennia of social learning and experimentation—can offer insights and be broadly applied to fostering resilient coastal fisheries today. Kearney and Hilborn (2022) have made similar comments. Such scale mismatches highlight the conflicts that can occur when dealing with scale issues in social-ecological systems. Consideration of lay and expert knowledge is necessary if managers are to understand the purposes for which such knowledge was created, as we showed above. What is crucial to understanding behaviour is the motivation (goal/purpose) of the actors. This usually involves geographical, temporal, technological, and institutional scales.

There are three groups of actors we consider here—(a) local (small-scale) fishers, (b) academic scientists, and (c) government scientists—examining each in turn.

(a) Concretely, fishers are harvesters. Their knowledge is about where, when, and how to catch fish. That means knowing a great deal about the fish themselves, and their behaviour within a local and thoroughly understood ecosystem. Local fishers know about fish and fishing assemblages—mostly the ones with which they are or have been engaged. In Trinity Bay, Newfoundland, for example, their taxonomy for codfish (Gadus morhua) in the 1990s distinguished between “herring fish” that came in the spring following the herring, and cod that came later. They talked about “mother fish”, larger, older, and more fecund female cod that they thought settled out in deeper water: some thought they should be protected because of their importance to the stock. Local taxonomies, that is, speak to local ecosystem dynamics. They also speak to behavioural and other complexities in a way that standard stock assessment concepts like “biomass” do not. Because fishers classify fish according to local harvesting information built up over generations, they are aware of micro-level variability and trends that are often invisible in stock assessment data. These kinds of knowledge can be (and have been) aggregated by researchers across spatial and temporal scales. Taking the data from interviews with fishers from different bays, through headlands, to offshore, and from several generations, for example, it is possible to assemble information that is often unavailable, or only partly available, in stock assessment data (Murray et al., 2008). Local fishers’ knowledge encompasses effort as well as catch information (including changes in efficiency), along with spatial and temporal distributions of effort, and information on fish migrations. That means it can be used to track trends in efficiency, which are crucial for the interpretation of catch per unit of effort data and relevant to understanding trends in abundance. Harvesters, as well as others in the industry, also know a great deal about markets and value chains, including past data, and this can provide insights on discarding practices—i.e. fishing mortality that does not make it into landings statistics.

Local fishers’ collective insights may be similar to those from stock assessment science—in which case they provide independent verification; where they differ, they provide the basis for careful analysis of both sets of information to move understanding forward. This is perhaps particularly important for under-studied and relatively low abundance species that can be depleted as a result of both targeted and bycatch fisheries. As shown in research on the northern cod collapse in Newfoundland, effort after that event shifted to these other species in the context of resource decline (Neis et al., 1999). The wisdom of local fishers can also point to information that is unavailable to deeper water trawl samples, such as distributions and trends in eelgrass abundance, where local knowledge has led to an appreciation of the value of eelgrass as a critical nursery for fish and shellfish. In like manner, the traditional knowledge of First Nations on the Pacific coast of Canada has provided information on, for example, seamounts or cold-water sponges, about which indigenous fishers and even some non-indigenous commercial fishers have long been aware (e.g. Frid et al., 2021).

(b) The second group under consideration is academic marine scientists. These are classifiers of a different kind: they operate at a wider geographical scale, and their task is to understand the species as a whole, in all its physical and related behavioural complexity, and then describe that “to science”, although that narrow focus is changing now as scientists become more acquainted with the importance of writing broadly, as the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports show. These scientists deal with the species writ large—they are generalists where fishers are particularists.

(c) The third group, government scientists, can be thought of as half-way between the other two groups, because they work with the specialist scientific language of classification (which is a wide-scale device), but apply that descriptive and classificatory knowledge to issues of harvest management at a range of geographical scales in order to make recommendations to policy-makers about management actions and regulations. Strictly speaking, they should be a bridge between the other two groups but in practice that does not happen because the geographical frame and institutional context of their work is much wider, perhaps covering several ecosystems or a whole coastline, and from near-shore to off-shore fisheries. Beyond that, they may work with other nations, to deal with open ocean-roaming fisheries.

It makes sense for all scientists involved in fisheries research, management, and policy to pay attention to the language of harvesters at all scales. That language contains information that is not only of use to harvesters, but also to managers and to academic scientists interested in species behaviours and distinctions among sub-populations. When government scientists work only with economists, they are missing this information and thus create policy scale mismatches, because they are leaving out this first part of their mandate. At the local (or individual, as with the deep sea skippers discussed in the 2015 paper by Paterson) scale, problems are obvious to those living with them, but in the larger frameworks with which managers and most scientists operate, such problems are often less obvious. Hence, they are often ignored or considered as random “noise” in the system in order to simplify the situation for policy development (e.g. Garcia and Charles, 2008). As a result, misunderstandings arise: government science assigns incorrect motivations to communities and misses the details of the scales at which local fishers or individual skippers operate. These issues led St. Martin et al. (2007) to call for a reorientation of fisheries social science to align with the concepts of an ecosystem approach now embedded within the natural sciences.

Figure 2 shows the over-simplicity of the current management model when compared to the complexity we have been discussing. It provides an illustration of the web of interests in fish and fisheries. The right side of Figure 2 explains why managers try to keep institutional structures simple: the real world is just too complicated! Such an accurate mirroring is probably unachievable in management, at least in the foreseeable future, but nevertheless approaches that capture more of the real complexity could and should be undertaken by fisheries managers. Moreover, when such complexity is openly acknowledged, then research can be undertaken that will identify those aspects that may be critical (positively or negatively) to management success without generating such an artificial divide between humans and nature as the diagram posits. The challenge is significant, but it urgently needs to be tackled if we are to bring local fisheries and their interdependent fishing communities to the attention of managers and policy makers, both national and international, and convince them that the global and the local are deeply connected. Important advances are currently being made in the context of co-management of such fisheries, in particular when applied using adaptive institutional frameworks (e.g. d’Armengol et al., 2018).

(6) Finally, Academic institutional scales are also contextually important in terms of what is known and assumed in the literature and thus by managers. Fisheries scholarship in the past has suffered from too little interdisciplinary work, necessary though that is when we recall the complexities involved. It is hard to teach interdisciplinarity to student scientists, however, given the way most academic institutions are currently organized, and given also the “siloed” mindsets of the funding sources available to student researchers and their professors (Ommer, 2018). This is deeply unfortunate since discipline-based studies provide a necessary, but not sufficient, foundation for understanding all fisheries, not just small-scale fisheries and their interdependent small coastal communities. Disciplinary bridges in and between governance organizations and the universities have always existed (most government scientists are university trained), but for most of the problems in fisheries there is a significant need for a more comprehensive understanding of all the players involved in fisheries—people as well as fish. That is why the understanding of society that has been built in the social sciences has to be taught alongside fish biology in our academic institutions. Students who go on to become employed in marine governance need to be able to comprehend and respond to the social and ecological dilemmas they will face in fisheries management.

Most common interdisciplinary bridges are currently between economists and marine biologists, probably because quantitative economic models and methodologies are compatible with those of the biologists. However, good as they were and are, such models do not and cannot take into account the complexities of human behaviour nor do they demonstrate adequate awareness of the marine environment (see, for example, Parsons’, 1996 critique of the Beverton and Holt, 1957 approach to fisheries science). Fisheries management is about understanding and managing people’s interactions with fish populations and the broader marine environment. At its core, this is the realm of the social sciences. Fishers’ behaviours differ depending on their experiences, family and community connections, economic concerns, and other social–cultural considerations (Clay and McGoodwin, 1995; Murray et al., 2005; D’Anna, 2016). This makes such social sciences as anthropology and sociology at least as important as biology in understanding and managing fisheries. The Canadian process for setting stock assessment advice relies on biology to set the conservation limits for a stock while accepting that harvest strategies will need to include other considerations such as additional ecological, social, and economic objectives (Marentette et al., 2021). Often, this has required scientists to apply their narrowly based findings to larger-than-local (and perhaps inappropriate) spatial and temporal scales. To date, the social objectives for most fisheries remain poorly developed (although see the “four pillar” approach proposed by the Canadian Fisheries Research Network, Foley et al., 2020).

Within the university research community, interdisciplinary research partnerships between social and natural scientists began to be developed and fostered in Canada in the 1990s. One of the earliest came about after the collapse of the northern cod (Ommer, 2002). The resultant societal crisis created a funding opportunity to work across the great divides between health, natural science, and social science/humanities, in a Canadian government funding program called the Green Plan (Government of Canada, 1990). In 1993, using Green Plan funding, a team of 30 researchers from these three rubrics, led by Ommer, came together, to carry out a program of ecological research to explore the social-ecological ramifications of the collapse. This team worked at various scales including community-level analysis, with marine scientists, sociologists, and ecologists all involved in field research, including fishers’ local knowledge, an approach that was not generally accepted at that time. This work demonstrated that the complex dynamics that exist between communities of fish and communities of fishers could be understood only by working with local fishers. It also demonstrated how the divide between people and nature is artificial (Ommer, 2002).

The complexity of the oceans and the need for interdisciplinarity is, fortunately, increasingly being recognized in regional marine science organizations such as the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES; see for example their Strategic Initiative on the Human Dimension at https://www.ices.dk/community/groups/Pages/SIHD.aspx, last accessed 5 January 2022), the North Pacific Marine Science Organization (PICES, e.g. their Human Dimensions Committee at https://meetings.pices.int/members/committees/HD, last accessed 5 January 2022), and in Integrated Ecosystem Assessments (e.g. Levin et al., 2009), but broader integration is still needed. As many world capture fisheries have continued to decline (FAO, 2020), it has become increasingly clear that working with human problems in the social sciences and humanities, and with the fish population problems in the marine sciences, in separate solitudes is proving increasingly dysfunctional. Newer work is involving social scientists, humanists, and natural scientists coming together in teams with communities and industry leaders (e.g. see Bastardie et al., 2021 for a European example); co-production of knowledge among diverse scientific disciplines and local and indigenous communities is also an important component of the United Nations Decade of Ocean Sciences (e.g. https://en.unesco.org/ocean-decade). However, this remains unusual (but see Levin et al., 2009; Stephenson et al., 2018), not least because of the institutional impediments involved that inhibit this kind of work. For example, Bennett et al. (2017) identified four barriers to the meaningful integration of the social sciences into conservation programs: ideology, institutional cultures, knowledge, and capacity. It is urgent that, at the very least, we include social scientists at the beginning of any conservation program, rather than in an “end-of-pipe” role (Lowe et al., 2013).

Ways forward

We have described scale problems going beyond the more commonly recognized problems of space and time, that complicate and hinder effective research and management of marine fisheries. These are not only Canadian, but global, problems. We make several preliminary recommendations on how to include considerations of scale (in all its forms) in fisheries management, and rank them from those that should be easier to implement to those that may be more difficult:

(1) Recognize the importance of fishers’, indigenous, traditional, and local knowledge in addition to academic and government expertise.

(2) Recognize fishers’ motivations, especially at the local/community scale.

(3) Thus expand the capacity of the information used for management. This will require individuals involved in management to have some knowledge of biology, oceanography, economics, anthropology, and sociology, at a minimum. Larger management and policy decisions will require an interdisciplinary breadth of knowledge, beyond the narrow discipline bases currently in university undergraduate courses. This means developing teams of people with different disciplinary expertise working together on important problems, i.e. the social sciences or marine sciences are not “end of pipe” add-ons.

(4) Match spatial management scales to the scales appropriate for the biology of the fish (with “fish” here defined to include both vertebrates and invertebrates) and also the scales used by fishers. There are three geographic scales of relevance here: that of the fish, of management, but also of the fishery. In practice, the management scales should encompass, and constrain, the scales of the fishery. The fishery itself, however, may occur at a larger scale if fishers need to operate in several management units to provide an adequate livelihood economic return for their work. This may be a difficult requirement for management institutions to meet because it could mean having different management scales and units for species with different ambits and habitats. This might require a “species-centric” approach to management units, which may be different for sedentary benthic species (e.g. mussels and clams), low mobility benthic and demersal species (e.g. sea urchins, crabs, various flatfish species), high mobility pelagic species, and highly migratory anadromous and catadromous species such as salmon and eels.

(5) Recognize the limitations of large institutions to manage fisheries at local scales. It is difficult for large institutions, in terms of their ability to gather information at local scales, to recognize the culture and motivations of local communities, and to develop and enforce management regulations at both small and large scales. Good progress on various co-management approaches is now being reported from around the world.

(6) Recognize the limitations of time-series data to establish the nominal “virgin biomass” (i.e. the biomass prior to fishing, which is used by stock assessment models to identify the levels of “safe” harvests from the fish stock). This is particularly important in a climate-changed future, when the history of a fish population may no longer be a reliable guide to its future status and productivity, and where “shifting baselines” have damaged analysis and thus recommendations in the past.

(7) Develop better indicators for fishing “effort” beyond simply the number of vessels or days fished, i.e. an indicator which takes account of the different technologies and fishing capacities in the fishery (and which recognizes different locations fished by different types of vessels and gears).

These scale issues are all vitally important since—unless we understand the scale issues and contextual dimensions, not only of what we do, and how we do it, but also why we do it—there is little hope that things will change. It is only when one understands the root motivational drivers for human actions that one uncovers the place from where to start instituting change. Put otherwise, fishery researchers, managers, and policymakers need to understand how scale interacts with the motivations of different fishing communities, such that imposing this regulation on these communities will cause the communities to respond in this way, which in turn will have this impact on the ecosystem. Managers and policy-makers will then have the data and tools necessary to make wiser decisions and better regulations that will work with, and for, people to bring about healthy communities of fish and of fishers.

Data availability statement

No new data were generated or analysed in support of this research

Author contributions statement

R.E.O. wrote an early version of this manuscript, but in its present form both authors have contributed to it equally.

Conflicts of interest

The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We thank Howard Browman for his encouragement and comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript. We also thank our Editor, Alf Håkon Hoel, and an anonymous reviewer, for their thoughtful and insightful comments and advice. Their guidance improved and sharpened our thinking and our presentation in this paper.

References