South Australia’s Marine Scalefish Fishery (MSF) is currently undergoing a strategic review with the principal aim of restructuring the fishery in order to ensure its long-term sustainability and economic viability. The heterogeneous mixture of participants, fishing devices, licence conditions and regulations associated with this fishery makes the tasks of administering and managing it extremely challenging. These complexities intertwined within a highly dynamic fleet that is capable of shifting fishing effort amongst species and regions often alters the emphasis of its overarching management. Industry and Government are working collaboratively to address the inherent complexities of the fishery through firstly developing a mechanism to rationalise the fleet, then reforming its overall structure, and ultimately refining its future management. In order to optimise this structural reform, it is necessary to disentangle and understand the fleet dynamics of this extremely complex fishery. This project aims to explore the implications of strategic management options (e.g. regionalisation, licensing, ITQ’s and ITE’s) on the future structure and viability of the MSF, from resource sustainability, economic and social perspectives.

There is widespread evidence, in Australia and internationally, of increased need for an improved, practical approach to integrated management (IM) of fisheries and other coastal marine activities that is able to fully embrace the social, economic and institutional aspects (the so-called ‘human dimensions), of management. Assessment and management systems traditionally neglect the human dimensions. Further, they treat sectors separately, often with different authorities managing diverse activities in different ways, resulting in inconsistencies in management across activities. The result is that there is almost no consideration of the cumulative social, economic or ecological impacts of multiple activities, and no way of informing trade-offs among activities in management decision-making.
Experience to date is that IM has been only partially successful. Management of multiple activities has been additive…squeezing one activity in among others (e.g aquaculture in light of others). While there are some examples of movement toward IM, these have resulted in partial or temporary success. There are examples where management has started toward IM, but progress has been stalled or has fallen back. In general, many preconditions exist, but it has been hypothesized that management is missing key aspects of intentional design that would allow IM to proceed.
The proposed workshop will bring together those with both the science knowledge and the operational knowledge of 8-10 Australian IM case studies and a few with international expertise, to evaluate and compare experience towards identifying key elements of success and failure of Integrated Management.