Social, Economic and Cultural Overview and Assessment for Ocean ...

1.0 Introduction
The move of Fisheries and Oceans toward an integrated approach to oceans management,
and the development of Integrated Management Plans for Large Ocean Management Areas
(LOMAs), requires attention to both ecosystem aspects and social, cultural and economic
considerations. DFO outlines the context for this report as follows:
“The past two years have seen the development of Ecosystem Overview and
Assessment Reports, and ecosystem and conservation objectives. In order
to successfully develop relevant objectives, however, it is also necessary to
conduct social, cultural and economic overviews and assessments in the
LOMAs. It must be noted that the goal of integration is to move beyond
treating social, cultural and economic issues and concerns as additional or
peripheral considerations toward a more proactive process that includes
these objectives as drivers and integral parts. Social, cultural, economic
and ecosystem objectives should be considered comprehensively as
interconnected parts of a complete Integrated Ocean Management Plan.”
The aim of this report is to conduct an international review of existing case studies,
frameworks and methodologies of social, cultural and economic data gathering, overviews,
and assessments relevant to marine management. In doing so, this report (1) covers
various geographic scales but maintains a particular focus on regional and/or ecosystem
based planning activities (2) includes examples from a range of countries and contexts, but
concentrates on examples that can most easily be transferred to a Canadian context and (3)
includes some generic works in order to help frame the discussion, but attempts to keep the
approach as practical as possible, focusing on insights into real examples.
The studies examined herein come from a range of situations and with a range of terminology.
For example, a common term is that of a “socioeconomic assessment”. According to the Socio-
Economic Manual for Coral Reef Management (Bunce, et al., 2000), such an assessment is a
way to learn about the social, cultural, economic, and political conditions of individuals,
groups, communities, and organizations. Bunce et al. (2000) note that there is no fixed list of
topics examined in a socioeconomic assessment, but the most commonly identified topics
include: gender, resource use patterns, stakeholder characteristics and perceptions, market
attributes for extractive and non-extractive uses, market and non-market use values.
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