Surveilling Commercial Fisheries
In this post, Kirk Jalbert, Matthew Cutler, Teal Guetschow, and Noa Bruhis reflect on their piece ‘Surveillance Systems for Sustainable Fisheries: Perceptions on the Adoption of Electronic Monitoring in the Northeast US Multispecies Fishery’, which appeared in the 21(3) issue of Surveillance & Society.
One afternoon in the heart of the University of Memphis during a workshop of our JPB Environmental Health Fellowship Program in March 2019, Kirk and I recognized a unique opportunity to pursue an innovative method that could enable rapid assessment of the social network influences on, and impacts associated with, environmental management policies. We had the fortunate position as JPB fellows to conduct collaborative work across federal agency and academic boundaries on pressing socio-environmental problems. Seizing this opportunity, Kirk and I embarked on a pilot project examining the influence of social media interactions between fisheries stakeholders on the development of electronic monitoring systems (EM) for Northeast commercial multispecies (groundfish) fishing vessels. This work would ultimately culminate in a study of surveillance and fisheries management that we published in Surveillance & Society. This research illustrates the potential for co-produced surveillable spaces in natural resource management, but draws important insights into the limitations based in part on conflicting sociotechnical imaginaries of those on either side of the surveillance equation.
At the time of our initial conversation about the potential for this work, the New England Fisheries Management Council (NEFMC) was developing a major management action to establish comprehensive (up to 100%) monitoring of the commercial groundfish fishery, including the use of new EM in place of traditional human observers. In simple terms, EM involves a system of digital cameras, video data storage, and human (or potentially automated) video review to verify a fishing vessel’s catch and discards (fish caught and released back for market and regulatory reasons). Amendment 23 was partially developed in the interest of improving fishery data streams that flow into stock assessments, but also as a response to recent evidence of misreported catch and discards.
I took notice of the volume of social media interactions between fisheries stakeholders, including environmental non-profits, fishing industry groups, and regulators, concerning the promise of EM to supplement the use of human at-sea observers, especially in view of recent cooperative pilot research programs testing these new systems on volunteer fishing vessels. These social media interactions, primarily on the platform formerly known as Twitter, seemed like fertile ground for analyzing social networks between fisheries stakeholders as they navigated new territory for managing a challenging and often contentious Northeast groundfish fishery.
Therefore, our project team spun up our own pilot project to test the feasibility and usefulness of social media data for social network analysis in this domain. We published the results of this research in the journal Ecology & Society. This initial test phase of our research program established a baseline of stakeholder networks that we used to identify key organizations for conducting in-depth, semi-structured interviews with representatives from those organizations on their roles in and perceptions of the development of EM for the Northeast groundfish fishery.
The results from these interviews with key stakeholders, including representatives from fishing industry groups, environmental NGOs, federal agencies, and EM service providers, shed light on the complexity of EM as a social and cultural issue as much as a fishery management issue. Stakeholders across boundaries identified a diverse range of concerns with EM, from privacy and data ownership to the technical feasibility and potential for mission creep. These blurred the lines between the intended use of EM and unintended consequences of its broader application to other aspects of fisheries management, such as vessel interactions with protected species and marine mammals. The results of this research had great importance in practical terms, including a whitepaper detailing results provided to the NEFMC as well as direct communication of our results to federal agency staff tasked with implementing the electronic monitoring program. One of the takeaways from our process is that social science research in fisheries management should continue to pursue mixed-methods approaches, incorporating new and innovative ways to assess the development and end impact of policies on fishing communities.
