DRAFT PAPER Fisheries Decision Making and Management Failure: Better Answers Require Better Questions

Many fisheries in North America are in crisis, creating ever more complex problems for managers. Management decisions are contested in court, changed via legislation, or merely ignored. As complexities multiply, accuracy of management predictions decrease. Managers need tools to examine complex fishery systems which include not only biological and economic concerns, but political, social and behavioral responses to decisions as well. To do this non-technical stakeholders must be able to understand and contribute to decision process in a meaningful way. Rather than striving only for better answers, managers must learn to ask better questions. The system dynamics modeling approach has evolved over the past 40 years into a tool widely used for business and policy analysis. Perhaps the time has come for its wider use in fisheries decision making. Qualitative causal loop diagrams, illustrated here, allow clearer thinking about causal links within a system, and provide a first step toward building quantitative, but understandable, “white box” models for fishery decision making.