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Fisheries management is like any other form of management: it involves deciding what actions to take to achieve prespecified objectives. The decision‐making process is paramount. Good analyses are worthless without effective decisions. Decision making can be divided hierarchically into strategic and tactical phases. Strategic decision making involves choosing the plan to achieve objectives, while tactical decision making involves choosing the actions to achieve the plan. Regardless of the phase, the ultimate focus of all management decision making is achieving objectives.
Although fisheries management is fundamentally similar to other forms of management, it differs in one important aspect: uncertainty. There are few other forms of management that have to incorporate such high levels of uncertainty into the decision‐making process. This characteristic has necessitated unique approaches to the practice of fisheries management. A possible consequence of this is that people may have forgotten some of the intrinsic decision‐making aspects of fisheries management and focused on the means rather than the ends. The means that have been developed often cannot be applied to fisheries that are low in value and thus for which few data are typically collected. For these fisheries, management decision making is effectively disabled.
In this article, we characterize two paradigms for fisheries management decision making: the “assessment paradigm,” which is based around stock assessments, and the “procedural paradigm,” which is based around management procedures. We call these paradigms because they are much more than simply approaches or methods; they involve particular ways of thinking about fisheries management decision making. For each paradigm, we analyze the decision‐making processes involved, their focus on objectives, and their success in providing management for data‐poor fisheries. Our intension here is not to provide a detailed critique of either paradigm but instead to highlight their fundamental differences. Our characterizations are thus intentionally polarized and will probably be inaccurate in detail for many real‐world fisheries management systems.
Much of what we say about these paradigms has been said before. Several authors called for a change in the approach to fisheries management over a decade ago (e.g., Stephenson and Lane 1995; de la Mare 1996, 1998; Stokes and Kell 1996; Lane and Stephenson 1998; Cooke 1999). Although progress has been made in the directions proposed by...