Doctoral Dissertation Research: Ecology, Participation, and Co-Management: Cooperative Resource Management Among Heterogeneous Groups in the Maine Lobster Fishery

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Environmental decision-making processes must cope with participants' diverse norms and worldviews, including conflicting models of nature and democracy. Outcomes frequently are less than ideal. In response to perceived problems in traditional methods of resource management, new kinds of organizational relationships have emerged. One of these arrangements is co-management, a system that gives increased amounts of decision-making authority to those directly engaged in resource use and extraction but that requires them to work in concerns with other groups that also have interests in the resource. In the Gulf of Maine, lobster co-management has emerged in part as a response to the depletion of other commercial fish stocks in and around the Gulf of Maine as well as in response to the ensuing public criticism of conventional management strategies. Co-management proponents have sought to provide new mechanisms to facilitate the participation of lobster fishermen in decision-making forums, and they have tried to institutionalize links between formal, bureaucratic processes and traditional, local practices. This doctoral dissertation research project will examine the capacity of the institutions involved in lobster co-management institutions to accommodate the multiple ecological and participatory models of fishermen, scientists, and managers, and it will investigate the differential impacts of co-management on participant groups and subgroups. The project will build on traditions of human-environment geography, theories of knowledge and democracy, and fisheries literatures in order to draw both theoretical and applied conclusions. The research design will integrate data acquired through interviews with key informant, participant observation, surveys, and focus groups. In addition to enabling the doctoral candidate to prepare a high-quality doctoral dissertation, the project will result in a report for the study area's fishing, scientific, and management communities including suggestions as to how the co-management process might be improved. This project will result in valuable new insights about the potential for co-management in the Maine lobster industry, and it will provide conclusions that can be tested elsewhere in order to better assess the strengths and limitations of this management strategy as well as its varied impacts on different groups. This kind of study is especially significant given the tendency for other North American fisheries to move toward greater stakeholder participation in decision making. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.