FAO.org

The news of the preparation of the FAO Guidebook for Evaluating Fisheries Co-management Effectiveness is arousing interest among fisheries stakeholders. During the week that celebrates the International Day of the Mediterranean Sea, the Low Impact Fishers of Europe (LIFE), an umbrella organization run by fishers to give voice to European Small Scale fishers, organized a webinar on fisheries co-management. Specifically, the webinar focused on the policy making and management processes that affect the Mediterranean fisherfolks. The webinar was held via the Zoom platform on 6 July 2021 and aimed to analyze the current situation of fisheries co-management in the Mediterranean, share experiences and look at how to promote co-management around different sites in the area. Ms. Elisabetta Martone, FAO Fishery Officer for the Smart Fisheries Co-Management project, was invited by the LIFE board to present the upcoming FAO publication, its scope and outline. 

Co-management forms a central plank underpinning LIFE’s mission to restore the health of European seas through improved governance, bringing fishers from the periphery to the centre of decision making. This takes into account different local and regional realities and builds on the experience and skills of people who directly depend on the fishery, stated Mr. Brian O’Riardan, LIFE Executive Secretary, during the opening speech. It is also fundamental to enhance the capacity of small scale fishers to engage more actively in managing access to fishery resources and in the marketing of their products. Therefore this needs to be built with a bottom-up approach and has to be improved all the time, underlined Mr. O’Riardan. Ms. Elisabetta Martone was the first event speaker and opened her speech by defining the scope of the Guidebook. The guide will offer a process and method to evaluate the performance of a fisheries co-management system in order to enhance its effectiveness in delivering benefits and in contributing to environmental, social and economic sustainability and good governance.

 The Guidebook is meant to be used to evaluate systems operating at a fishery, community or sector level, or in a spatially defined area.  Ms. Martone stressed the fact that the Guidebook is not designed to be used to evaluate an entire fisheries management system but focuses instead on the co-management component, and delivered key messages, among which:

1. The Guidebook presents a flexible approach that will be useful for all operational scales of fisheries.
2. The primary audience for the Guidebook are people who commission an evaluation and who carry out the evaluation.
3. The Guidebook consists of five sections: the context; a discussion on the definition of fisheries co-management, good practices, and a generic model of fisheries co-management; an overview of the adaptive policy analytical framework; the core of the publication, i.e. the three-step evaluation process; the post-evaluation process.
   
   

The webinar attendees showed interest and asked several questions, especially with regards to the finalization of the publication and the reference model. The Guidebook is being evaluated against case studies, said Elisabetta Martone, and will be fine-tuned against these results.