Dr. Jennifer Silver, Geography, Environment and Geomatics, University of Guelph. "Shifting tides: some motivations and prospects for addressing human dimensions in fisheries evaluations and management"

Abstract

Commercial fishing is an important industry for many countries and crucial to well- being in innumerable coastal communities. I will begin the seminar by overviewing fisheries management, especially approaches to licensing, and discussing literature that describes how rationalization leads to social and economic restructuring. Next, I will discuss research-in-progress that examines licensing history and present-day licence holdings for fisheries off of British Columbia. The history describes how fleet size decreased, harvesting capacity increased, and the licensing landscape became ever-more complex between the 1970s and 1990s. Counts of licences for 2017 show that a handful of ‘access rich’ and a much larger number of ‘access constrained’ holders now exist. I will conclude by discussing how objectives related to licence and quota holdings would position government agencies to better integrate human dimensions into management.