Community-Based Fisheries Management
What is Community-Based Fisheries Management (CBFM)?
In its purest form, CBFM is a system in which fishermen and their communities exercise primary responsibility for stewardship and management, including taking part in decision making on all aspects of management, such as harvesting, access, compliance, research and marketing.
Other features of CBFM include local control, a focus on the ecosystem rather than on specific species, power sharing, and a common interest in and responsibility for common resources.
A CBFM program in Nova Scotia uses a similar definition: community-based resource management is a development approach that emphasizes the interconnectedness of humans and the natural environment, and is geographically and ecologically based, giving the people who live in an ecosystem the primary responsibility to manage their activities in a way that fosters sustainability. This approach emphasizes the importance of collaborative and adaptive information, power sharing, transparency, fairness, and the embeddedness of resource use with the cultural, economic and social fabric of the community.
For several reasons, CBFM in its fullest form would be impossible in U.S. fisheries, with the exception of fisheries conducted by Native American treaty tribes. For instance, the American precept of public access to the coast, the ocean, and fishery resources hinders communities from excluding outsiders from access to local resources-a key element of CBFM abroad. Second, within regional economies and even most local economies, fishing does not play the significant economic role that it plays, for example, in the Philippines.
As a result of these factors and the pressures of declining resources, fishery management in the United States can be described as the opposite of CBFM. Fisheries management in the United States focuses on single species, not ecosystems. It places fishers in an adversarial role vis-a-vis resource managers. It rewards history of high catches and penalizes small, diversified fleets. It is federalized, not local. It is highly scientific and has only recently begun to embrace local ecological knowledge. Even the Federal regional fishery management council system, which was designed to take advantage of the knowledge of people who actually fish, has become politicized and professional. Indeed, one could identify what to change about the current Federal management system by comparing it with the principles of community-based management mentioned above.
Notwithstanding these constraints, several approaches can be used to promote sustainable, locally managed fisheries in the distinct conditions of the United States.
From: Summary of Opportunities and Obstacles For Community-Based Fisheries Management in the United States: A Report to the Ford Foundation by Michael L. Weber and Suzanne Iudicello-Martley 2004.
