Framing the problem with stakeholders: five views to herring fishery management

Fisheries management is often subject to disputes due to high uncertainty and high values at stake. Such disputes call for improving the communication between parties, the understanding of policy processes, and transparency. We hypothesize that a transparent basis for a dialogue could be built through a participatory process in which the different underlying assumptions and values regarding a complex issue are modeled. We involved five stakeholders from different actor groups to define boundaries for the Baltic Main Basin herring fishery management. We asked them to consider 1) Which variables should be taken into account in herring management, 2) Which variables are of primary interest, 3) What should be the objectives for herring management, and 4) What kind of management measures could or should be used to reach these objectives. The views of the stakeholders were built into causal maps representing variables and their linkages, and compared. A causal map is an illustrative tool to systematically structure complex issues. By loading a causal map with quantitative information in terms of probabilities, it can be transformed into a Bayesian network. Such a network can be used as a sophisticated decision support tool which explicitly includes the views of different stakeholder groups.