The Norwegian College of Fishery Science, which is part of the University of Tromsø’s Faculty of Biosciences, Fisheries and Economics, plays a significant role in the EcoFishMan project.

Under Professor Michaela Aschan the College leads Work Package 4, the objective of which is to specify and design a fisheries management system based on the principles of results-based management. In addition, University of Tromsø will participate in almost all the other EcoFishMan work packages.

From 1 January 2012 Kåre Nolde Nielsen, an expert on fisheries management, will be employed by the Norwegian College of Fishery Science as a post-doctoral research fellow attached to the EcoFishMan project. Dr Nielsen, a Danish national, did an undergraduate degree in biology at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, followed by a master’s in international fisheries management and a doctorate in social science, both at the Norwegian College of Fisheries Science.

In Norway, Dr Nielsen’s assignment will be to conceptualise results-based management (RBM) and then to look at instances in Europe where RBM has been introduced and to discuss the scope for reforming fisheries management based on RBM. He will first review the use of RBM in New Zealand fisheries during a two months field study. In a second stage of his work he will review fisheries management systems in the EU. Finally, he will contribute to the conceptualisation of a model for RBM in the EU and propose a plan for a feasible transition towards RBM. On a recent trip to Denmark, Dr Nielsen discussed with Eurofish, the EcoFishMan partner responsible for dissemination, the work he would be doing for the EcoFishMan project.

Dr Nielsen, you will be spending the next 30 months working for the EcoFishMan project. What do you hope to achieve during this period?

I am very interested in the concept of results-based management (RBM), which I think is the most important notion in the EcoFishMan project. RBM can be understood as a type of contract between an authority and, for instance, a group of people who wish to use a particular marine resource. RBM specifies the conditions for the use of the resource in terms of:

1) Defined standards or results to be achieved (e.g. minimum stock levels or operational management targets)

2) Adequate documentation to prove that the standards or results are achieved

The point is that as long as resource users are able to document that the standards or results are achieved, the authorities will not care about how they do it. This means that there is no need for “micro-management, that is, rules specifying every detail in the fishing operations. In contrast, the resource user is granted freedom to invent better ways of doing things – as long it is shown that the outcome is acceptable.

My vision is that RBM can be used generically for European fisheries management. European fisheries are highly complex with many different fisheries, different situations, capacities and possibilities. The advantage of RBM is that it can be implemented in different context, at different levels, and to different extents; it opens up for other ways of doing things differently while maintaining a check on the state of the natural resources and their environmental context. RBM offers flexibility to improve operations  reaches all the way from the technical changes that can be made locally to improve management and the way up to the reform of the system at a more general level.

With European fisheries as diverse as they are, is it realistic to think that results-based systems of management can be introduced here?

I feel that with RBM there is a possibility to gradually reform European fisheries management. New Zealand and Australia are two countries that have a lot of experience with RBM. In New Zealand the use of RBM includes the traditional top-down management, where the fisheries administration is responsible for regulation and monitoring, and the scientists for the data collection and modelling of resource state. The RBM feature of this, however, is that management is about standards and documentation rather than about detailed process regulations. At the other end of the spectrum, there are examples of RBM being implemented by a group of resource users, who have taken over many of the regulatory, data-collecting, and monitoring functions. This shows that RBM in a European context might allow for a gradual transition from top-down management towards co-management.

What kinds of restrictions could hinder the introduction of RBM and how would you deal with them?

This is an important question. Over the years there have been several critical reviews of the CFP, but it has often proved difficult to implement their insights in practice. When seeking to improve the CFP it is important to recognize that there may be different explicit or implicit barriers to reform. For instance, the principle of “relative stability,” which stipulates that each Member State’s share of each Community quota stays constant over time, has been one of the pillars of the CFP since 1983. A reform proposal that is perceived to compromise “relative stability” may meet steep resistance. Again, I think the flexibility of RBM systems may be the key here. For instance, the catch quota system that was trialled in Denmark is a form of RBM that conforms to the principle of relative stability. This shows that RBM may be implemented to reform fisheries management without stumbling over barriers such as “relative stability.”