Contrasting Paradigms for Fisheries Management Decision Making: How Well Do They Serve Data‐Poor Fisheries?

We contrast 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. The assessment paradigm has difficulty in providing management for data‐poor stocks, and we illustrate this in the New Zealand context. In contrast, the procedural paradigm has the potential to be useful for the data‐poor stocks. However, to date, it has not served data‐poor fisheries well because most of the development of management procedures has been for high‐value, data‐rich stocks. This may be because several aspects of the procedural paradigm are misunderstood or neglected. Giving appropriate attention to these aspects will improve the application of fisheries management procedures, particularly for data‐poor stocks. For example, more attention needs to be given to the method for presenting evaluation results to decision makers in ways that more easily allow them to make trade‐offs among multiple management objectives. We also argue that the design, evaluation, and selection of management procedures should be treated as an exercise in engineering, particularly by applying generic solutions to data‐poor cases for which specific solutions are usually not readily developed.