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Page 163, Wilson: Two Cultures Theory of Fisheries Knowledge: Atlantic Bluefish
E XAMINING THE T WO C ULTURES T HEORY OF
FISHERIES K NOWLEDGE : THE C ASE OF THE
NORTHWEST A TLANTIC B LUEFISH
DOUG WILSON
The Institute for Fisheries Management North Sea Center, Willemoesvej 2, P.O.Box 104, DK-9850 Hirtshals, Denmark Phone : +45 98 94 28 55 Email : dw@ifm.dk
A BSTRACT
Many accounts have relied on a general contrast between fishers' knowledge and scientists' knowledge. This 'two cultures' theory suggests A) that both training and experience lead fishers and scientists to think in systematically different ways about fish and B) that breakdowns in communications caused by this difference in knowledge cultures is a primary reason for fisheries management failures. The case presented here qualifies both of these suggestions. The research combines a participant observation study of scientific decision making, with a discourse analysis of debates around the management of Atlantic bluefish ( Pomatomus saltatrix ) from 1996 through 1998. The paper traces seven disputes over bluefish science and argues that institutional factors, rather than differences in understanding, were more important influences in five of these seven disputes. Fishers and scientists did not think differently about most of the central facts in the debate over the condition of the bluefish stock. In fact, they were in broad agreement. The final outcomes of the debate, however, involved a wholesale and specific rejection by the scientists of the "anecdotal" information that the fishers considered important. This happened in spite of the fact that most of the scientists involved believed that the anecdotal data accurately reflected the condition of the stock. The reasons for this outcome, which satisfied no one, are to be found in institutional factors that constrained and distorted the scientific debate, rather than in differences in culture among the parties concerned.
INTRODUCTION
Discussions of the differences between local ecological knowledge (LEK) and research-based knowledge (RBK) often reflect, more or less consciously, a “two cultures” theory that emphasizes how and why scientists and fishery workers see the resource in different ways (Berkes 1993, Felt 1994, Pinkerton 1989, Smith 1990,1995). Berkes (1993) sees LEK as beliefs associated with indigenous societies that have
been handed down through generations and suggests that these systems of knowledge share among themselves characteristics distinct from Western RBK (Berkes 1995). Others have made similar observations about people of European extraction. Finlayson (1994) in his book on fishers’ knowledge and the collapse of the Canadian cod argues that Department of Fisheries and Oceans scientists "willfully dismissed" the insights of the inshore fishermen because of dissimilar cognitive cultures. Because they used alien rules, norms, and language in the negotiation of validity, "Knowledge claims by members of each culture were literally heard as incoherent by the other” (p. 103). Smith (1995) also argues that both fishers and scientists see the other as violating "plain common sense.” For example, both Smith (1995) and Pálsson (1995) found the same reaction to transect surveys amongst fishing skippers in separate studies: the scientists don’t seem to realize that fish swim! Roepstorff (2000) suggests that fishers in Greenland "focus on fish as a living being" and think of them as “mass nouns” while scientists see the fish as a “count noun,” meaning that the individual fish is a representative of the stock in the sense that the stock is the arithmetic sum of the single fish.
While appreciating the importance of these insights, I believe that this “two cultures” approach to the differences between LEK and RBK needs qualification. One problem with contrasting LEK and RBK as two cultures is simply that there are many more than two knowledge cultures in both categories. As even a short review of the sociology of science makes clear, science is made up of many communities with different scientific cultures and standards of validity (Barnes et al. 1996). Different local communities also have their own knowledge cultures. Nor is it useful to hold a position, while conceding ‘of course, there are more than two knowledge cultures,’ that there are still enough essential differences between LEK and RBK that they are useful as ideal types. As Agrawal (1995) argues, this will likely stereotype LEK while idealizing RBK. Good cultural explanations of LEK and RBK within a particular management situation begin with an empirical approach to uncovering communities of common understanding among both professional scientists and fishery workers.
An institutional approach to social influences on fisheries knowledge may yield more useful insight and be more empirically accurate than a cultural one. Here a cultural explanation is one that focuses on how one group shares meanings
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that another group does not share. When Finlayson (1994) makes the argument mentioned above about dissimilar cognitive cultures making fishers and scientists mutually incoherent, he is offering a cultural explanation. An institutional explanation focuses on the way in which interactions within and among groups are structured, and how institutional attributes block or distort arguments that would otherwise be mutually understood. These structures include formal laws, operational rules, fora for discussion and decision-making and social networks. When, elsewhere in his book ,Finlayson (1994) argues that the data produced by offshore fleets was privileged over data from inshore fleets, he is offering an institutional explanation.
Drawing a distinction between culture and institutions has some very artificial aspects. The best understandings of institutional maintenance draw heavily on the concepts of culture and cultural embeddedness, where shared understandings are institutional products (Jentoft et al. 1998). The reason for using the distinction here is that fisheries social scientists have overemphasized the idea that fishers and scientists see the world differently. Not only does this threaten a reification of the categories of “scientist / RBK” and “fishery worker /LEK ,” it leads us to underestimate the degree to which the rules governing management and stakeholder interactions create these apparent gaps in how the world is seen.
I ground this argument through an examination of the roles and beliefs of various stakeholders and how they affected their determination of the “best available science” with respect to the management of Atlantic Bluefish ( Pomatomus saltator , Linnaeus 1766) during the period from the fall of 1996 to the spring of 1998 in the United States. The case study begins with a description of the methods used and a brief background discussion about bluefish management. Then each of the seven disputes about bluefish science is described in turn.
C ASE STUDY B ACKGROUND METHODS
The case study presented here is part of a larger study of the tensions between science and public participation in fisheries management. This study includes two other Northeast Region species case studies and two random sample surveys, one of marine fisheries scientists and the other of the general population of people active in fisheries management in the Northeast Region. Information for the case studies was gathered in a number of different ways. Formal
key informant interviews were carried out with 24 scientists, 21 fishers (many of whom served on advisory panels), nine activists in, or active observers of, the fisheries management system, and four administrators. Approximately 200 management-related documents were reviewed, including ten complete transcripts of the Council and/or Commission meetings, of which four related directly to bluefish. We also observed a total of 43 meetings.
Background on Bluefish
In 1976, the US Congress redesigned federal fisheries management and created eight regional Fisheries Management Councils (see also Glaisel and Simonitsch, this vol). Representatives of the fishing industry sit on and hold voting rights on the councils, which have certain powers over the creation of fisheries management plans (FMPs) in federal waters. These councils are only one part of a complex “alphabet soup” of agencies and other institutions. Table 1 overleaf provides a guide to help the reader navigate this soup. The regional council responsible for bluefish is the Mid-Atlantic Fisheries Management Council (hereafter the Council). The Council works very closely, indeed regarding bluefish it usually meets around the same table, with the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (the Commission), which is responsible for bluefish management in state waters. The third major government actor in bluefish management, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS, pronounced nymphs) implements FMPs in federal waters and must ensure that they meet certain national standards.
US marine fisheries management between 1976 and 1996 was generally not a success. The dominant explanation given by observers was that the council system, and a history of close NMFS - industry cooperation, has put the ‘foxes in charge of the hen house’ (Safina 1994). In 1996, changes in Federal Law addressed the ‘foxes’ problem by both strengthening NMFS’s powers vis-a-vis the regional councils and by more precisely defining the 10 National Standards that all federal FMPs must meet. During 1997, NMFS developed guidelines for implementing the new laws. Some of the most important related to specifying “objective and measurable criteria” for overfishing. These guidelines allow an overfishing definition to contain either a maximum rate of fishing mortality or a minimum acceptable stock size. In practice, for many FMPs including bluefish, both of these components of the overfishing definition are required (MAFMC and ASMFC 1998). This language also makes the creation of an FMP for
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In Figure 1, the peer review process is placed on the intersection between the science boundary and the stock assessment model. Stock Assessment Workshops (SAW) are open meetings that take place at Woods Hole. The SAW’s assessment is then peer reviewed by a Stock Assessment Review Committee (SARC), which is also an open meeting that includes a broader group of fisheries scientists. The findings of the SARC are then presented in Public Review Workshops, which are basically informational and the one observed here did not involve any modifications of the material. NMFS and other fisheries administrators view basing an FMP on the findings of a SARC as the strongest foundation for certifying that the legally required “best scientific information available” has been used.
The process of creating Amendment One of the bluefish FMP began in December 1994 (when SAW 18 found serious problems with the condition of the stock), and ended in the fall of
- The first two years of the Amendment One process, 1996, took place under pre-1996 rules.
NMFS pushed hard for severe restrictions on the recreational bluefish catch, negative public reaction was intense and the Amendment failed to pass the Council. Under the old system, NMFS could not force the issue by threatening to impose its own FMP. In the fall of 1996, SARC 23 (NEFSC 1997) started the second round in the creation of Amendment One with a new bluefish stock assessment. They found bluefish to be “over exploited,” a term that now triggered a legal requirement for a plan to reduce fishing effort. This finding contradicted a previous finding by the BTC that the bluefish stock was “fully exploited.” This stock assessment was greeted with widespread disbelief and anger. This was partly because changing the stock from fully to overexploited, especially with the legal ramifications of the change, was seen as high- handed. But there was also a strong sentiment
that the SARC’s decision was simply wrong and it had recommended drastic measures based on very shaky evidence. The case study traced seven major scientific disputes around bluefish science in the period from SARC 23 assessment to the official designation of the “best available”
Technical Committee
Actual
Condition of the
Bluefish
Stock
(unknowable)
Explanatations of Stock Condition
Environmental Factors Displacement Fishing Pressure
Data Issues
Aging Survey Catchability Effort Measurment Fishers' Observations
Stock Assessment Model
Overfishing Definiton: F SSB
Legal
Condition of the
Bluefish Stock
The Science Boundary
State Scientists (^) ScientistsNMFS
Council Scientists
NMFS adminstratio
Council Staff and Members
State Fisheries Agencies and State Legislatures
ASMFC staff ASMFC Board members
Federal Fisheries Management System
Main Bluefish Scientific Issues 1996-
Fishing public
State Fisheries Management System
Actual Fishing-Related Impacts on the Resource
P eer Rev iew: SAW , SARC, S+S
n
Figure 1: Schematic representation of the scientific institutions involved in bluefish management
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scientific knowledge that would be the basis of Amendment One. Each of these disputes is presented in turn, and evaluated in terms of the degree to which cultural or institutional factors (as defined above) were the driving force in the course taken by the dispute. Table 2 lists the disputes according to the outcome of this evaluation.
DISPUTE #1: T HE A GING OF B LUEFISH
The problem of aging bluefish is one that received relatively little attention among nonscientists concerned with bluefish, but which the scientists considered very important. Knowing the age of individual fish is critical because the more sophisticated ways of measuring fish populations are based on tracing year classes, which are cohorts of fish of the same age. It takes time to figure out how old a fish on a lab bench was when it died. It is done by looking at the fish’s scales or its otoliths (hard formations found in fishes’ inner ears) and counting the rings in them as you would do to age a tree trunk. Because aging fish takes so long, samples of fish are used to make “age-length keys” which give the probabilities of a fish being a particular age if it is a particular length.
SARC 23 (NEFSC 1997) used age-length keys for bluefish that came from the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries (NCDMF). In August 1997 the Mid-Atlantic Fisheries Management Council received a letter from the South Atlantic Fisheries Management Council. They were concerned that keys estimated from winter commercial catches in 1995 had not been used with information from recreational catches being used instead. Fish caught in the winter commercial fishery are twice as big as the summer, recreational fish. They also raised a
new issue. The NC data was based on scales and not on otoliths, which their S&S Committee feared might lead to inaccuracies of as much as three years.
The NCDMF addressed this second concern with a study of bluefish aging techniques. They reported their findings at the Bluefish Technical Committee (BTC) meeting in February 1998. They had found that whole otoliths are not reliable for aging bluefish beyond age three. The reporter described aging a bluefish older than age six as a “crap shoot” and suggested that many ages in the past had been assigned by guess. They recommended that when analyzing the bluefish stock, fish over age six should be lumped together into a “six +” age category. The use of such ‘plus’ groups in these models is standard practice, but the question of the age at which to set them is an important one.
At the March 1998 BTC meeting, Woods Hole was represented by a scientist deeply involved in assessing bluefish. Almost immediately, as the minutes for the February meeting were being read, he began to object to the “unsubstantiated rumors that you can’t age fish” based on the NC report. In a tense moment in the meeting, the state scientists reacted defensively that nothing in the minutes should be construed as an endorsement of the NC presentation. The federal scientist insisted that this be made clear because he “does not want to get blindsided by this stuff.” Later, he presented two bluefish stock assessment models. One was based on the currently used 9+ as the oldest year class, the other on 6+. The 9+ gave an initial stock size in 1982 of 379,000 tones and a 1996 size of 158,000 tones. The 6+ model decreased the stock size by half in 1982 and by a factor of four in 1996. To understand the implications of this, remember that the new law required that a minimum stock size be established and that management measures must rebuild to that level, whatever it is, in ten years. The choice of the final model of the bluefish stock was strongly influenced by the desire of the scientists to avoid using unreliable aging data.
Table 2: Important Scientific Disputes in Bluefish Management Type of Dispute Disputes Mainly Rooted in Cultural Differences
Disputes Mainly Rooted in Institutions
Data Issues Aging of Bluefish Usefulness of Survey Data Effort measurement
Usefulness of Fishers’ Observations Competing Explanations for Observations about Bluefish
Environmental Factors
Fishing Pressure
Offshore Displacement
Government scientists were the only stakeholders involved in the dispute about bluefish aging. They were certainly not interested in publicizing this powerful ammunition for stakeholders who would like to delegitimize government science. The 10-year rebuilding requirements added particular urgency to the question as well. Therefore, there were institutional reasons why the dispute unfolded in the way it did. However, all of these
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At first the Council member thought that the scientist was saying that they had not updated the effort data itself, when he had meant that they had not changed the way that data was modelled. This is perhaps because the Council member was focussed on the question of whether or not the change in effort was being considered. The federal scientist’s need to double check the answer, implies that he was not aware before this interchange, of the degree to which the fishing public was concerned that changes in effort were being ignored. The opaque language he chose to use in his last remark suggests that he still may not have sensed the degree of concern.
In addition to the fear that changes in effort are being ignored, members of the fishing public frequently expressed three other criticisms of MRFSS as a measure of effort. The first is that the general telephone survey does not cover Pennsylvania, and a great many of the customers on party and charter boats come from the Philadelphia area. The second is that in the intercept survey, work is only done during the day, while a lot of bluefish fishing is done at night. They also believe, and I have heard a scientist express this belief as well, that the CPUE is higher at night than it is during the day. These things are seen to be correlated as night anglers are often from Philadelphia.
The third criticism is that the growing number of anglers who catch and release their bluefish rather than keeping them is not considered. As one sports fishing organization put it the “methodology becomes even less dependable when you consider that the recreational community has, in most recent years, been releasing the majority of its catch. This brings into question the use of recreational “landings” and recreational “catch” in the assessment. It almost appears the two are interchangeable in places when in actuality, the figures are different by orders of magnitude” (JCAA 1998). This criticism does not accurately apply to either the SARC 23 assessment (NEFSC 1997) nor the stock assessment adopted for Amendment One (Gibson and Lazar 1998). Both of these explicitly considered the release of fish and used figures that reflected the increasing trend toward catch and release. Recreational effort measurement was addressed by both the SARC and the BTC as a serious technical issue, especially once larger issues of model and raw data selection were becoming clarified.
Even more than the aging, effort measurement is a good example of how a lack of shared
understanding between the recreational fishing community and the fisheries scientists can drive a fisheries science dispute. On the one hand, the anglers had difficulties understanding when and how the scientists were incorporating effort data into the models, while the scientists had a difficulty understanding the sources and degree of the fishers’ concerns. On the other hand, the recreational people’s knowledge of who fished and when led them to be much more critical of the ways effort was measured.
DISPUTE #3: T HE STATUS OF F ISHERS ’
OBSERVATIONS
Fishers believe that they have considerable information to contribute to bluefish management. In interviews, fishers pointed to their knowledge about how different combinations of changes affect the bluefish stock, and particularly tracing the movements of the fish. Examples they gave of their knowledge of bluefish involved both what they were seeing and what they were hearing from different kinds of fishers around the coast. The observations they found important involved the behavior of both bluefish and species that the fishers associate with bluefish, e.g. striped bass, menhaden, and sand eels. These behaviors were most often seen as driven by environmental changes, particularly water temperature. What emerged from these discussions were not simply “anecdotal data,” but “anecdotal hypotheses” (see also Stanley and Rice, this vol) about what is happening to the stock. None of the fisheries scientists interviewed, nor the fisheries scientist who accompanied us to some of these discussions with industry members, found these not yet systematically tested hypotheses, unreasonable. Anecdotal hypotheses for what was happening in the mid-1990s took various forms, but all suggested that the bluefish had moved offshore.
Fisheries scientists that we spoke with agree that using fishers’ observations to improve stock assessment would be a good thing. At the state level in particular, there have been many instances of scientists working with fishers to address local research problems and to collaborate in research efforts that involved more than just using fishers’ ad hoc observations. Both fishers and scientists learn in these small scale interactions.
The most critical problem, especially for NMFS, is one of scale. It includes both the logistical issue of processing detailed information from across the breadth of the Northeast Region, and the conceptual problem of translating local
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observations into meaningful information at a larger scale. One attempt to use logbook information from party and charter boats was overwhelmed just by data entry demands. This led to loud resentment from the people who provided the data. Over the course of the case study, many presentations of LEK by fishers were made to scientists in public fora. A typical response to such presentations was “you’re right and we looked at that question, and additional work is needed.”
The use of fishers’ observations in stock assessments is a charged issue. At one meeting, in response to a council member’s raising the question of the degree to which fishers’ observation did not jive with the SARC 23 assessment, the Regional Director (RD) of NMFS began by pointing out that anecdotal information is very difficult to use because fishers’ observations in one place often don’t agree with observations in other places. Then he said the following:
‘ Anecdotal is not a pejorative description, neither is analytical, although people are very happy to throw rocks at the analysis and are offended if people say ‘that is anecdotal.’ That seems to me to be silly. Nobody ignores anecdotal information .....Anecdotal information is used in the way that you can use anecdotal information, the same with analytical information. There is nothing pejorative about it.... I have never felt that it is not used in the assessment. It is used in the analysis when people are examining tuning indices and trying to explain why certain things occur in diagnostics. That is exactly what they used. It is used extensively.’
Two things are interesting in the RD’s statement. The first is the defensiveness, he wanted people to understand that this is not some bias he or anyone else at NMFS has against the knowledge of fishers. The second is the assertion that fishers’ observations are used as background information in putting together an assessment model. As will be clear, this case study suggests that this role as background information is a very problematic one.
The treatment by different stakeholders of fishers’ observations, characterized by the use of the term “anecdotal data” by scientists, has important cultural elements. To some extent, different groups have different understandings of what makes a fact valid. Arguably these differences are more formal than substantive, by which I mean the “common sense” that lay people use to understand nature is often very similar in content to the method of the scientist.
NMFS’ basically positive response to using fishers’ observations, and the real attempts they have made to do so, suggest that institutional problems run deeper here than cultural ones. We simply do not know how a government agency can make more than ad hoc use of fishers’ observations, the response “you’re right and we looked at that” is often the best they are able to do under the rules they have to operate under.
DISPUTE #4: SURVEY C ATCHABILITY.
Two basic types of data are involved in stock assessment, information about the catches of fishers and “fisheries independent” data from surveys. Fisheries independent data is a critical source of information because the same gear is used in the same place year after year. Effort, i.e. the amount of time that the gear spends in the water, can be accurately measured, and the hauls are placed across the ocean according to a deliberate, mathematically designed plan. The Northeast Fisheries Science Center at Woods Hole does two surveys of the ocean between Canada and Cape Hatteras, which is approximately the mid-point of the US east coast. Because the most important commercial fish species are groundfish, the NEFSC surveys are done by pulling a trawl net along the bottom. Bluefish is a migratory, pelagic species that spends most of its life swimming quickly through the water high above the bottom. The catches of bluefish in the spring survey are so sporadic that it is not even considered in evaluating the stock. Data from the fall survey, however, is used in evaluating the stock.
Scientists point out that this poor catchability is not sufficient reason to dismiss the data. As long as the same gear is always used in the same way, the results are usable if the variance in the catch is not too high. Of course, ‘too high’ is a matter of judgement and an important one in the bluefish assessment. The fall survey is divided into geographical areas and there is an important distinction between the inshore and offshore areas. The inshore survey catches are of the order of fifty times as many fish as the offshore survey. This huge difference comes almost entirely from the number of young, age 0 and 1 fish that the inshore survey catches. In the offshore survey, the majority of hauls show either 0 or 1 fish, and so it becomes very difficult to arrive at statistically valid conclusions. The inshore and offshore contrast is very important in light of the dominant anecdotal hypothesis that the bluefish had moved offshore.
Much of the fishing public perceives these surveys as inadequate and many of them do so
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During the Public Review Workshop for SARC 23 the following statement was made by a fisher on the Council. It is representative of a common criticism of management.
‘We’re protecting all of the predators, fluke, striped bass are recovered, we’re protecting the weakfish, we’re protecting all of the predators, how about everything else? We’re trying to protect the butterfish, the squid, everything in the ocean, but there has got to be a natural balance somewhere.’
A few minutes later:
Another council member : One of the things that
we’ve discussed in the few years that I’ve been on Council, and in other meetings prior to being on Council, was a greater understanding of the migratory patterns and the relationships to ocean conditions and water temperatures and bait [fishers often refer to prey species as “bait”] availability for this species. Has there been any additional work done on that, because it could be a significant contributing factor to the presence in our waters?
To whom came the response:
NMFS Scientist: The other paper we looked at
was one where we had a correlation matrix with about 25 environmental and biotic variables reviewed in that paper [note: this is the paper mentioned above] and, of course, the problem with a correlation analysis is that you don’t know which ones are spurious.. the recommendation as a subcommittee... to do more work in that area.
Another comment made at the meeting:
I ndustry representative: That seems to be the
approach sometimes, that we want an ocean full of bluefish and we want an ocean full of striped bass and those things may simply not happen. The problem is, in the process, what [The NMFS scientists] said is correct, the fishing pressure is the only thing that anybody can do anything about, but that makes the fishing industry the lowest common denominator in that attempt to maximize simultaneously or multiple variables. I disagree with the idea that fishing is the only thing that you can do anything about because certainly one of the greatest benefits to the bluefish resource might very well be to reestablish a greater commercial fishery on striped bass.
This statement shows another important aspect of the political complexities of considering species interactions, because the appropriate extent of the commercial fishery on striped bass was the most contested question in striped bass management. Many in the bluefish recreational community mirror this issue by arguing that a cause of the decline of bluefish is commercial
fishing on prey species, particularly menhaden. The reduction or elimination of the menhaden fishery has been a priority of several recreational fishing groups.
As in other disputes, the dispute over the role of environmental factors reflects some cultural differences based mainly in scientific training. Scientists want to be able to model something before they start treating it as real. This is especially true when that treatment has a legal basis. The reason I have not classified this dispute as rooted mainly in culture, or even as rooted more or less equally in culture and institutional factors, is that all stakeholders basically agreed that environmental factors are important. The real differences were in possible responses to these factors, the law that NMFS in particular is mandated to carry out is designed to control the activities of fishers. The new laws do emphasize the importance of habitat, and require FMPs to identify areas of essential habitat for the species, but all NMFS is able to do with this information is to write letters to other agencies asking them to consider the protection of this habitat. To take into consideration all of the potential interactions may be academically appealing, but it is a poor fit with legal and political realities. This theme carries over into the next dispute.
DISPUTE # 6: T HE E FFECT OF FISHING
PRESSURE ON THE B LUEFISH STOCK
The second explanation given for the stock condition was that it was being overfished. SARC 23 concluded that fishing mortality has exceeded the appropriate biological reference since 1991. Critical reactions to these findings mainly took the form of highlighting the problems with the data discussed above. The varied reactions of other scientists to the model also focused on the data problems, particularly the aging issue.
During this year and a half period between SARC 23 and the creation of alternative findings by the BTC, NMFS put up a sprightly defense of the SARC findings and the need to take the management actions that they called for. Early on, NMFS cast the disagreements with the stock assessment as coming from “the sentiments” of people who were not willing to face reality. At the council meeting that followed the Public Review Workshop in February 1997 for SARC 23 the following exchange occurred:
Council Member (an academic): I believe
that when this and these additional analyses go out to public hearing, there will be tremendous discussion, tremendous public concern on
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what’s occurring here, and perhaps once that public comment is completed, this Council may wish to take very careful note of that comment and reconsider some of the actions that it’s taking.
NMFS Regional Director: This has come up a
number of times now about the concerns that the public will have .Clearly, it will be controversial, but sometimes the need to do such things is controversial, the issue is what is needed to try to rebuild this stock. So, I think that regardless of the public outcry, sentiment and so on, it is important to be clear that that is what is apparently needed.
NMFS’ application of the FAO Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries and the precautionary principle (FAO 1995) is at the heart of their vision of management and fishing pressure is what NMFS is best empowered to control in a precautionary way. NMFS scientists tend to conceptualize fisheries management as a technical problem and fishing pressure plays a key role in this conceptualization (Wilson and Degnbol 2001). During the initial presentation of SARC 23 at the Public Review Workshop, for example the NMFS scientists said
‘So, again, I repeat that the focus of the SARC was more on, how do you get out of the current dilemma of, say, doing things that are within man’s control, and the only thing you can do is really to lower catches.’
Other stakeholders are less comfortable with this assumption, as in this quote from an interview with an industry representative:
‘Biologists are starting to acknowledge that there is less impact now, but they are saying “oh, maybe there’s not but we still have to protect them and this is the only way we can do it, we can’t deal with environmental factors, we can deal with you so we are going to screw you guys”. I don’t think it is going to have a great deal of impact biologically but ... It will destroy more human beings and small businesses who cannot survive this and who are not the cause of the problem.
The conflicting interests in fisheries management means that there can be no final, objective criteria that determine where the burden of proof lies. The issue in the final analysis is about the distribution of gains and losses from assuming or avoiding the risks of overexploitation. Those who are going to lose business now from a cutback, and who may or may not be the ones who enjoy its potential future benefits, are going to be much less sanguine about considering other causes of stock
decline that cannot be responded to with changes in fishing pressure as irrelevant. While nearly everyone gives lip service to the precautionary principle, many people resist, and not always unreasonably, its stark demarcation of what the null hypothesis should be. As a council member put it at the special bluefish meeting:
‘[With all due respect for the precautionary principle] I think you will have a very hard time convincing people that it is wise to take actions that will put people out of business today because if we get squared away two years from now that we really didn’t need to do that in the first place well now you can tell them to go back in business. Once they are gone they’re gone.’
The dispute over fishing pressure clearly stems much more from institutional than cultural sources. All parties acknowledge that the size of a fish stock is a function of both environmental factors and fishing pressure. It is the law that requires that a target fishing mortality be identified, and the reason it does that is because that is what is most feasible to control legally. The dispute over the relative emphasis on fishing pressure versus environmental factors is driven by interests and by the rules that have been set up to adjudicate those interests. This is as much true for the government, which has a strong interest in emphasizing aspects of nature that are amenable to bureaucratic manipulation, as it is for the fishers.
DISPUTE # 7: T HE DISPLACEMENT
H YPOTHESIS
While there were many issues and problems with the bluefish assessment one disagreement stood out. Many people involved in the bluefish fishery, including scientists, believed that the observed decline in the bluefish stock was an illusion created by a large and sustained movement offshore of larger bluefish. The bluefish had moved away from where they had been caught in the past and the methods of catching them, both those of fishers and scientists doing surveys, had not followed them.
Among fishers the idea that the bluefish had moved offshore was close to a consensus. Longliners who targeted swordfish complained that bluefish were stealing their bait much more than in the past. Others told me that they had heard the same thing from tilefish and wreckfish fishers who fish in deep water canyons. This was the typical nature of the information. One fisher’s observation was reinforced by that of another until a picture of the position of the resource was built up that was entirely coherent,
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has repeatedly shown up in the analysis that the Committee has done, it’s not the usual one and in fact, most of the time you have a hard time justifying using this kind of relationship, but in this particular case we reviewed the evidence, both in terms of the analysis that you normally use to look at the fishing pattern. Also, as I mentioned before there is some, albeit weak evidence that larger fish are moving offshore and they may not be available, that would be a plausible mechanism why you would have a dome shaped curve.’
So while this scientist continues to characterize the evidence for the displacement hypotheses as weak, it is the only explanation he offers for why the “funny fishing pattern” keeps showing up in the data so often that they feel they have to go ahead and use it in the assessment in spite of the difficulty they have in justifying such a decision.
The displacement hypothesis became the central issue in the deliberations of the Bluefish Technical Committee. As described above, one of the models they were considering used the NEFSC off-shore trawl data and showed that bluefish was not overfished. Meanwhile, the other ASPIC model showed that the bluefish were overfished. The ASPIC model did not use the offshore data and its key assumption was the stock was fully available to the fishery. Bluefish is a recreational fishery which takes place near the shore; if the displacement hypothesis had any merit at all this assumption was not valid. Many, if not most, of the scientists that spoke at the meeting, however, believed that the displacement hypothesis had merit. One scientist, when accused of not believing it, responded that he had been catching bluefish far offshore just like other people (Wilson and Degnbol 2001).
The ASPIC model had a number of advantages, both scientific and institutional. It did not rely on aging fish. It yielded both a measure of standing stock biomass and fishing mortality, both of which are required by law if it is possible to obtain them. The management advice it triggered was not nearly as drastic as that from SARC 23, but was more conservative (more conservative = more restrictive of fishing) than the other model. Its being more conservative was definitely considered a plus by some, as a state scientist said,
‘I don’t know if we can spin it that way [chosen for being more conservative] but we should keep this in the back of our mind.’
Another scientist responded that one could call it conservative, or biased low. Finally, it was more
scientifically standard than the alternative model, hence it would stand up to the kinds of peer review that are concerned with maintaining standards in science for public policy (Wilson and Degnbol 2001). The committee did not want to make a final decision. They decided to pass the final decision on to the Council’s Scientific and Statistical Committee. They did this knowing that the ASPIC model would be chosen. As the presenter of the ad hoc model that accepted the displacement hypothesis said ‘ I don’t think that my analysis will pass [the Scientific and Statistical Committee] as well as the ASPIC, I just think it is the right answer.’
In May of 1998 the newsletter of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission announced their decision with the following comment:
‘The S&S committee recognized the shortcomings of the assessment but concluded that it represents the “best scientific” characterization of the Atlantic bluefish stock given the currently available data. An important caveat is that the assessment does not consider the possibility that the sharp declines in landings and abundance indices may be due to migration of adult bluefish to offshore areas.’
The displacement hypothesis was the center and essence of the LEK about bluefish and supported by many scientists. Just as the RD had said, this “anecdotal data” was seriously considered by the scientists charged with making the stock assessment. That is was specifically rejected by the adoption of the ASPIC model as the “best scientific characterisation of the Atlantic bluefish stock” was even acknowledged in the announcement of that adoption. In spite of the scientists’ awareness that the models key assumption of availability was questionable, valid scientific reasons, such as avoiding unreliable aging and survey data certainly contributed to the selection of the ASPIC model. But from the perspective of the social influences on the scientific process, cultural differences did not drive this dispute; the mutual understanding of the parties was nearly complete. It was the institutions of fisheries management, i.e. the legal requirements for specific types of answers, the administrative need for a peer review process that does not use “ad hoc” judgements, and the political need for an outcome which was precautionary but not too draconian, that made the ASPIC model the best science available.
C ONCLUSION
The seven scientific disputes around the management of Atlantic bluefish in the mid 1990s are listed in Table 1 and evaluated in terms
Putting Fishers’ Knowledge to Work: Conference Proceedings, Page 176
of whether or not they are best explained as driven by culture, defined as the degree of shared understanding among the various stakeholder groups, or institutions, defined as the rules and practices governing management and stakeholder interactions. Most of these disputes contained both elements, but five of the seven seemed more clearly driven by institutional factors than by issues of mutual understanding.
These categorizations should not be overdrawn. As was conceded in the introduction, this strong distinction between what is “cultural” and what is “institutional” is an artificial analytical distinction made to drive home a specific point. Even as defined here, the distinction is hardly mutually exclusive as cultural and institutional factors can be found in all of the disputes. Nevertheless, the basic point is an important one: institutions have the power to “ systematically distort communications ” (Habermas 1987) involved the social construction of nature even in situations where the stakeholder groups understand each other well.
As do other social scientists involved in arenas of policy where science is important, fisheries social scientists face a difficult task as we try to understand social influences on the knowledge base used for fisheries management. We have recognized the importance of different worldviews in the process of building this knowledge base, and this case study suggests that we need to pay close attention to the distorting affects of rules and institutions as well. We can draw on tools to accomplish this from a number of areas. Many studies exist of the use of science in legal and regulatory areas (e.g. Jasanoff 1990, Salter 1988). A literature is emerging on the relationship between bureaucracy and quantification (e.g. Porter 1995). Various Habermasian concepts are also available to analyse the effects of social structures on human communications from a general perspective (Habermas 1987, Wilson et al. 1999). The application of these tools to fisheries management may well help us better understand how to develop a sound knowledge base for management within our disagreement- ridden policy arena.
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