Local Stakeholders Understand Recreational Fisheries as Social-Ecological Systems but Do Not View Governance Systems as Influential for System Dynamics

Abstract

Recognition that there are often social and ecological components to problems that arise from management of shared resources has led to a dominant paradigm among academics that natural resource management should consider coupled social-ecological systems. For academic theory to have real-world impact it must be understood and acted upon by stakeholders at a local scale. However, it is unclear if stakeholders view their systems as coupled social-ecological systems. We interviewed key stakeholders in an inland recreational fishery to solicit their mental models of system dynamics in the context of Ostrom‘s Social-Ecological Systems Framework (SESF). We found that stakeholders in aggregate considered all components of the SESF (actors, resource systems, environmental settings, and governance systems) in their view of recreational fisheries. However, researchers viewed governance system and environmental setting components as less diverse than actor and resource system components, while anglers and managers viewed the actor component as more diverse than all other components. In addition, all stakeholders viewed governance system and environmental setting components as less influential than actor and resource system components. Given strong empirical evidence of positive relationships between the number and diversity of governance system attributes and successful fisheries outcomes, our results suggest that governance systems that prevent free riding, enforce rules through graduated sanctions, and address large scale problems at the local scale through nested institutions could improve social-ecological outcomes in inland recreational fisheries.