Environmental and Social Justice for Whom? The Challenge of Identifying and Protecting Different Populations in North Pacific Fishery Management Actions

Since the early 1990s, major federal fishery management initiatives in the North Pacific have included a range of community protection measures. These measures have been designed to sustain existing community fishery engagement patterns and/or proactively foster new patterns of community fishery engagement. The individual measures have been promulgated under a number of different mandates, from provisions of the Magnuson-Stevens Act (as implemented through routine fishery management council processes) to directed Congressional actions, among others.  Actions subject to National Environmental Policy Act review have also been subject to the analytic provisions of Executive Order 12898 on environmental justice. The challenges of identifying and attempting to protect communities and populations from adverse impacts of fishery management actions have been met in a variety of ways over the years. This variation is, in part, a function of the different types of management actions that have occurred, including sector-based allocative splits, critical habitat and endangered species protection measures, and the transition to catch share programs. This presentation provides a typology of these measures and provisions, a review of the “for whom” social justice was sought, and an overview of outcomes to date.