Developing a Comprehensive Framework for Evaluating Fisheries: An Interdisciplinary Success Story

Fisheries sustainability frameworks and metrics continue to proliferate since it began to be recognized a few decades ago that the oceans are not limitless in their productive capacity.  An ongoing challenge is how to incorporate social, economic and governance measures of sustainability with the biological and ecological focus of fisheries management.  This is, in part, a problem in interdisciplinarity.  The Canadian Fisheries Research Network, a nationally funded research and training initiative, has been developing a comprehensive framework for evaluating the sustainability of capture fisheries in Canada over the past five years.  The network brings together academics and students from the natural and social sciences, fishermen and fishing industry representatives, and government scientists and managers.  Building on previous work on ecosystem approaches to fisheries management, this unusual collaboration has generated novel ways to integrate social, economic, ecological and governance domains in a single framework.  Using qualitative techniques from the social sciences, this presentation will examine the process of developing the framework to identify design features and emergent qualities that supported or hindered effective interdisciplinary collaboration.  The implications for future research and training networks that seek to combine multiple disciplines to tackle complex problems in fisheries will be discussed.