Fisheries Management and Economic Policy
Summary
Fisheries management and economic policy intersect to safeguard marine resources while supporting livelihoods and food security. Core approaches include setting harvest limits, designing property‐right instruments and deploying market-based tools to align individual incentives with collective sustainability. Regulatory frameworks often combine total allowable catches with effort controls, gear restrictions and spatial closures to maintain stock health and ecosystem integrity. Economic policy shapes these frameworks by assigning tradable rights or access fees, internalising externalities and fostering compliance. Recent shifts emphasise supply-chain efficiency, bycatch mitigation and the integration of small-scale and community fisheries into governance systems. Technological advances—from on-board processing to real-time monitoring—are reshaping cost structures and data flows, enabling adaptive management. Globally, the balance between conservation and economic growth hinges on harmonising biological reference points with socioeconomic objectives, ensuring that policy instruments remain responsive to environmental change and market dynamics.
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Fisheries Management and Economic Policy publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in fisheries management and economic policy across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Total allowable catch (TAC): A regulatory limit on the total weight of a species that may be harvested during a management period to prevent overfishing.
Individual transferable quota (ITQ): A market-based property right granting fishers a tradable share of the TAC to incentivise efficient harvesting and stock conservation.
Bycatch quota: A cap on the incidental capture of non-target species within a fishery, managed alongside target species limits to protect vulnerable populations.
Risk pool: A cooperative mechanism in which fishers aggregate their bycatch quotas and exchange information on fishing locations and practices to minimise individual quota breaches.
References
- Can higher resource utilization be achieved in demersal fish supply chains? Status and challenges from Iceland and Norway. Resources Environment and Sustainability (2024).
- Institutional nuts and bolts for a mesopelagic fishery in Norway. Marine Policy (2020).
- Bycatch Quotas, Risk Pools, and Cooperation in the Pacific Whiting Fishery. Frontiers in Marine Science (2019).
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