Operational tools and adaptive management

Within these three different groups; input, output and economic regulations; there is a large
variety of different management tools. We will in section 2 present the tools and their
intended effects.
Usually, there will be a connection between the fisheries regimes (way of thinking about
fisheries activities) and the measures applied to regulate these activities. For example, when
the gear became increasingly efficient (during the 1960s and 1970s) leading to a sharp
increase in catches, the response from fisheries authorities was to set input regulations
(maximum engine size, limiting number of days at sea), and when new equipment was
introduced, making it simpler to find and catch the fish, regulations with respect to the gear
(minimum mesh size, bycatch devices) were implemented. This development obviously was
a kind of “mouse‟s game with the cat”, where the industry invented more and more efficient
boats and gear, and the authorities introduced new regulations to prevent the catches from
increasing to a size of non-sustainability as the input became more efficient.
Understanding this game, and that there could be no winner in it, there was a shift in the
authorities‟ approach from input regulations to output regulations. This was the time for
introducing the TAC system (1980s) which is still one of the cornerstones in the CFP.
This, however, led to another type of game, namely one between the member states and the
EU authorities. The relative stability principle implies that the (relative) share of the TAC
allocated to each coastal member state shall remain constant, whereas the actual size of the
quota to each member state will vary with the TAC. It is the member state‟s task to enforce
the national TACs, and this division of tasks gives rise to a type of behaviour characterised by
the 1/N effect. If all other coastal nations fish only their quota then one nation may “default”
and beneficially exceed its quota. As the consequences of this single nation‟s overfishing has
to be born by all coastal member states, the consequences for the single member state will be
small. This is however the perspective of each state, and hence we are back in the “tragedy of
the commons” situation, which the regulations were supposed to conquer. This situation is
characterised by the fact that individual rationality diverges from what is rational taking the
whole society (EU) into consideration.
MEFPO‟s precursor, the EFEP project, carried out a stakeholder investigation where they
asked for some stakeholder‟s responses to selected regulatory tools (or combination of tools)
and to what degree these were acceptable tools. In this report we study a broader set of
management tools, but limit our investigation to expert opinion regarding these tools. We
focus on four criteria in order to measure and assess the management tools; politically
acceptability, cost effectiveness, ecological effectiveness and dynamic effectiveness. With
regards to political acceptability we concentrate on the political acceptance of the decision
makers (e.g. bureaucrats or politicians) in the relevant fisheries management. Cost
effectiveness is secured in two possible ways; 1) when there is an aim of improving the
economic performance of a given fishing fleet, and some improvement may be expected to
take place and/or 2) when the aim of the management tool is to conduct the fishery as whole
in the most cost effective way. Ecological effectiveness is characterised by the measure
reaching some ecological goal, for instance securing the stock size at some level, or ensuring
that only fish over a certain size is caught, while dynamic effectiveness is the securing of the
ecological goal over time. I.e. can the management tool be expected to sustain its ecological
aim over time? Strictly assessing according to the aims of the tools gives different
assessments compared to when experts view the tools from a national or even European
Commission perspective. This clearly points to the potential problems of implementing
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