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What Are We Managing Anyway?: The Need For An Interdisciplinary Approach To Managing Fisheries Ecosystems, Jean-Jacques Maguire, Barbara Neis, Peter R. Sinclair

Dalhousie Law Journal

Fisheries managers should really be attempting to manage the fishing fleets and the processing industry, not the fish. Consequently we argue that effective management ought to take an eco-systems approach that is necessarily interdisciplinary, incorporating both natural and social sciences. We ascribe the inadequate results of existing management regimes to scientific uncertainty, political pressures, the regulations' lack of legitimacy among fishers, and excessive reliance on individual fishers (rather than households and communities) as the unit of analysis. In a new interdisciplinary approach, we emphasize the contribution of social science in helping to understand what is defined as Scientific knowledge, how …