A Review of Global Fisheries Performance

Abstract

Management of fisheries is complex as it combines environmental, economic and social objectives. The relative importance of these objectives is highly debated and the best approaches to achieving good outcomes are unclear. A lack of global and multi‐dimensional data has largely precluded reviews providing comparisons of performances across systems at a large scale. We review fisheries performance by analysing outcomes over 14 dimensions of environmental, economic and community performance using a unique global dataset for 145 fisheries collected with the Fishery Performance Indicators. The fisheries are ranked into three performance groups by an average of their environmental, economic and community scores: the 10% best fisheries, the 10% worst fisheries and the middle 80%. Furthermore, we investigate how four different types of management systems, catch shares, territorial use rights, limited entry and open access, are represented in the three performance groups. The best performing fisheries scored equally or better and the poorest performing fisheries scored equally or worse in environmental, economic and social dimensions. We found three different management systems to be represented among the best performing fisheries, indicating that no specific management system is best. Moreover, some management systems were represented in all three performance categories, indicating that fisheries characteristics or management designs are important elements of fishery performance. The worst performing fisheries were dominated by open access fisheries with no or very limited management.