nfcc: national fisheries conservation center

Fisheries Science Collaborations: The Critical Role Of Community
By Doug Wilson

**This essay was abstracted from a paper prepared for a keynote presentation at the Conference on Holistic Management and the Role of Fisheries and Mariculture in the Coastal Community, November 11-12, 1999, Tjärnö Marine Biological Laboratory, Sweden. Click here to read the full version.

If collaborative fisheries science is going to work we have to recognize and accept the reality that people, often using similar sets of facts, construct different pictures of nature. Science is vulnerable to distortions wherever scientific facts are produced, interpreted and communicated. These distortions can arise from economic pressures, bureaucratic procedures, legislative mandates and from the demands involved in creating an effective movement to protect the environment. That is the real situation: nobody is objective. If people are going to learn to work together they have to start by recognizing this. It would be a mistake to fall back on what Lane and Stephenson¹ critically refer to as a "Republic of Science" that seeks to isolate science in pursuit of an illusionary objectivity.

There are alternatives. I have interviewed more than one fisheries scientist involved in ongoing collaborations who has described real progress towards people agreeing on more realistic pictures of the resource. While objectivity is never fully achieved, a group's deliberations often become increasingly realistic as they work together because as they learn to trust each other the outcomes of the discussions are more often determined by better arguments.

Why Collaboration is Needed

The tension between expert knowledge and democracy is a fundamental social issue. It is an especially acute issue in fisheries because:

fisheries policies are often very difficult to enforce without reasonable cooperation from fishers, so their inclusion in management decision making process is critical; and,
fishers know much too much about fish to simply nod and agree when a "guy in a white coat" makes a pronouncement about what is going on in the ocean.

Toward the end of 1999 I made an informal search for examples of collaboration between fishers and scientists in North America. What I found seemed to reflect four operating models of collaboration.

Four Models of Fishers/Scientists Collaboration

The Deference Model: Scientists are the experts and the best way to get an accurate picture of nature is to rely on their professional judgment.
Traditional Ecological Knowledge Model: Scientists and fishers see the world differently because of differences in training, experience and culture. Science can be improved by listening to what fishers have to say about the resource.
Competing Constructions Model: Scientists and fishers collaborate within interest groups to create pictures of the resource that reflect particular concerns.
Community Science Model: Scientists and fishers collaborate in the context of inter-stakeholder cooperative management, co-management and/or community development.

The Deference Model

The deference model is the most widely accepted "common sense" idea of science. Scientists are the people that society has trained and given the institutional and physical tools to decide what is true about our natural environment. That is their job and they are the best ones to do it. The most widespread of this type of collaborative work is data gathering for scientists in which fishers and others act as research assistants, a very common example is tagging studies. Another common type is fishers participating in research through providing research platforms, logistical support and at-sea collaboration.

The Traditional Ecological Knowledge Model

The traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) model both incorporates, and is a challenge to, the deference model. No one claims that TEK produces generalisable, scientific information. The emphasis is on local information that can supplement research-based knowledge. In this sense the TEK model builds upon the deference model. However, the TEK model makes two important claims. The first is that TEK reflects the thinking of fishers and so is critical to producing a picture of nature that will be accepted. The second is that TEK, while not generalisable, is just as valid as that produced by formal science: the scientist is no longer assigned the role of the gatekeeper who has the final word on what is or is not known to be true about nature.

The Competing Constructions Model

Scientific knowledge gets used for many things that people may not immediately associate with science. For example, scientific facts get used as symbols; different groups use them like flags to rally around an issue or raise money. Scientific facts also get used to trigger management decisions, providing objective criteria for the invocation of rules. People select different facts from fisheries science to put together an overall picture of the resource that fits their needs. In spite of the insults about "disinformation" that get bandied about when tempers flair over management disagreements, there is usually not anything sinister about this. The scientific questions that people ask, and the answers that they find useful, are always related to some agenda. This is true in the highest scientific ivory tower, it is certainly true throughout fisheries science. Asking different questions, and using facts in different ways, builds different pictures of the resource.

This does not mean that there is no such thing as an objective fact and it does not mean that all descriptions of the resource are equally valid.

Because they are confronted with different questions and problems, each of the major players in fisheries management, and the scientists that work with them, tend to construct a version of nature that fits their needs. This means, to put things as simply as possible:
government scientists tend to construct a picture of nature that is more amenable to bureaucratic management than it really is;
environmentalists, who always have to solve the problem of mobilizing their constituents, tend to construct a picture of nature that is more threatened than it really is; and,
fishers tend to construct a picture of nature that can sustain more fishing than it really can.
A few years ago I witnessed an intense collaboration between fishers and scientists from a state management agency. A meeting had been organized by a Fishery Management Council member to prepare responses to what they felt was an inaccurate stock assessment of Atlantic Bluefish. What follows is an extract from my field notes (a tape recording was inappropriate), covering about three minutes of the three-hour meeting. It is edited to protect the identity of participants as required in my invitation to attend:

Council member/commercial industry rep: At the Council meeting they [NMFS] will have MRFSS [Marine Recreational Fisheries Statistics Survey] data.

Lawyer who works with the recreational industry: We have to be ready. You can't just walk in and react to NMFS' data. You go in with complete MRFSS data which show no truncations in year classes.

Council member/recreational industry rep: in spite of [NMFS official's] softening stance we still have to go in with as much data as we can.

Lawyer: Hard data with length, CPUE [catch per unit effort], and [the state agency] needs to verify us.

Scientist A: We can get it on their web site.

Scientist C: We can use the most recent stock assessment.

Fisher: We can't go in with just a feeling, we need data.

Scientist C: [Two types of] boats we have. We need a list of [another type] boats. We need the anecdotal information listed out.

Scientists D: We should request the data on [the second type of boat] from NMFS.

This was a collaboration between scientists and fishers who were convinced that their case had merit and they were prepared to do what it took to win. This meant selecting the most defensible scientific facts that suited their goals. This model of collaboration between fishers (and other interested parties) and scientists describes the most common collaborations of all. They happen every time a group that employs scientists and has an interest in fisheries shows up at work.

Science as Community Model

Many people involved in fisheries management are creating innovative institutions to bring about collaborations in science that recognize that different constructions of nature are going to exist and use open communications to try to move beyond them. They are bringing the dynamics of "community" into the fisheries science process. I found several examples of such efforts, especially in Alaska and the Maritimes. One of the oldest examples is the Fishermen and Scientist Research Society, which began in 1993 in Nova Scotia. It is a partnership between 156 fishers and 42 scientists that emphasizes participating in and enhancing stock assessments where fishers and scientists work together to identify hypotheses and design a research agenda.

Doug Wilson is a sociologist and Senior Researcher at the Institute for Fisheries Management in Denmark. His current research includes working with biologists to identify simple indicators of fisheries ecosystem health that are both biologically sound and reflect local understandings of the resource. Another publication related to the present subject is Bluefish Science in the Northeast Region: A Case Study. Click here to view the PDF version of the report, and here for the associated figure.

Lane, Daniel E. and Robert L. Stephenson. 1998. "Fisheries Co-management: Organization, Process and Decision Support" Journal of Northwest Atlantic Fishery Science 23:251-265.