Identifying stakeholder preferences for rebuilding a Canadian Atlantic redfish fishery—limitations and benefits of different opinion survey approaches

Fisheries management authorities seek to improve the incorporation of stakeholders’ preferences into decision-making but conventional approaches to assessing stakeholder viewpoints may risk under-representing a diversity of opinions. In Atlantic Canada's Units 1 and 2 redfish fisheries, there are competing visions about re-developing the fishery following historical overfishing. A management strategy evaluation (MSE) sought to identify which fishery objectives should guide the formulation of performance metrics. Following the MSE, we carried out a study to further sample the social, economic, and ecological objectives for the fishery using multiple questioning methods, i.e., workshops, questionnaires, and interviews. Results of interviews and questionnaires identified areas of consensus and complexity of opinion among the different groups (commercial, government, and Indigenous), and showed that the workshop-based performance metrics defined in the MSE underrepresented the diversity of stakeholder preferences, particularly regarding social and economic goals. Multi-method and multi-disciplinary approaches to formalizing objectives are resource-intensive. However, there is value in applying multiple methods to systematically develop and formalize performance metrics that accurately reflect a diversity of stakeholders’ priorities for the fishery.