Integrating fisheries approaches and household utility models for improved resource management

• Published in: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS Vol. 108; no. 4; pp. 1741 - 1746
• Main Authors: Milner-Gulland, E. J., Miles, Edward L.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States National Academy of Sciences 25.01.2011; National Acad Sciences
• Subjects: Agricultural management; Agriculture - methods; Agriculture - statistics & numerical data; Algorithms; Animals; Biodiversity; Biological diversity; Biological Sciences; Budget allocation; Compliance; Conservation; Conservation of Natural Resources - methods; Conservation of Natural Resources - statistics & numerical data; Crop harvesting; Crop management; Decision Making; Ecosystem; Family Characteristics; Fisheries; Fisheries - methods; Fisheries management; Fishery economics; Fishes - growth & development; harvesting; Household management; Household utilities; households; Humans; Integrated approach; Law enforcement; Models, Theoretical; Natural resource management; Natural resources conservation; overexploitation; Performance evaluation; Resource management; Uncertainty
• ISSN: 0027-8424; 1091-6490
• DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1010533108

Natural resource management is littered with cases of overexploitation and ineffectual management, leading to loss of both biodiversity and human welfare. Disciplinary boundaries stifle the search for solutions to these issues. Here, I combine the approach of management strategy evaluation, widely applied in fisheries, with household utility models from the conservation and development literature, to produce an integrated framework for evaluating the effectiveness of competing management strategies for harvested resources against a range of performance metrics. I demonstrate the strengths of this approach with a simple model, and use it to examine the effect of manager ignorance of household decisions on resource management effectiveness, and an allocation tradeoff between monitoring resource stocks to reduce observation uncertainty and monitoring users to improve compliance. I show that this integrated framework enables management assessments to consider household utility as a direct metric for system performance, and that although utility and resource stock conservation metrics are well aligned, harvest yield is a poor proxy for both, because it is a product of household allocation decisions between alternate livelihood options, rather than an end in itself. This approach has potential far beyond single-species harvesting in situations where managers are in full control; I show that the integrated approach enables a range of management intervention options to be evaluated within the same framework.