Access and Equity: Strengthening the Foundations for Sustainable Fisheries and Prosperous Coastal Communities

About the Project

Most major fish stocks are harvested at or over maximum capacity; recent research suggests that large transnational corporations are benefiting disproportionately. In Canada, fisheries management is not designed to track or distinguish who has opportunities to use and benefit from fish stocks. Moreover, fisheries management plans do not articulate objectives or guidelines for how coastal and Indigenous communities will benefit from commercial fisheries now and in the future.

This project will characterize different groups of harvesters in two important British Columbia fisheries, illustrate opportunities that they have had to use and benefit from the fisheries during key time periods, and develop indicators that could be used as proxies for access and equity in fisheries management and social-ecological assessment more broadly. In doing so, the project will generate a pathway towards more sustainable fisheries and strengthen the foundations for coastal prosperity. The project will contribute to fisheries literature and scholarship in political ecology by linking fishing licenses and quota to uneven socioeconomic outcomes at the local and regional scales and will produce social network analyses unique to each case study fishery.