Proceedings of the 2005 North American Association of Fisheries Economists Forum

edited by U. Rashid Sumaila and A. Dale Marsden

As Director of UBC’s Fisheries Centre, it is pleasure to introduce these proceedings, which document an event, the 3rd Biennial NAAFE Forum, held on May 25-27, 2005 that UBC was proud to host. This was one of the many events that UBC hosts in the course of a year, all proofs of our role as a major research university - although I must admit that it probably helps that UBC is located at the edge of Vancouver, which besides being regularly elected, along with Zurich, as one of the best city in the world to live in, also has the attractions to make it a superb place to visit.

However, it is as researcher and fisheries biologist that I am most pleased with these proceedings. They cover a wide range of topics, documenting, in the process, the enormous variety of conceptual and methodological approaches which economists deploy to study fisheries. To me, this is exhilarating, indicating as it does, that there is, across the disciplinary divide, as much to discover and work with, as on my own multifaceted side of that divide.

In fact, if we could match, or better ‘pair’ each of these concepts and methods with concepts and methods from the discipline across the divide, we would perhaps achieve the understanding and cooperation most of us seek, but mostly fail to achieve because we do not consider the same assumptions realistic and useful, and apply different methods to study the same fisheries.

This would also allow us to make more of the available data, which are often costly to get, especially if they are to be reliable. And, more importantly, this would allow us to see the same fisheries from several angles, with each facet reflecting its own light. Or to use another metaphor, the different disciplinary accounts would ‘jump together’, i.e., lead to ‘consilience’ as defined in E.O. Wilson’s book of the same title.

Consilience between fisheries economics and fisheries biology should not be hard to achieve: we study the same fisheries, and the biological signals from the species being exploited to the fishers, and thence the economic signals to the markets where the catch is sold, and back to the resources that fishers deploy to catch fish, have to be coherent, and reflect the same reality. The distinct accounts of biologists and economists must be consilient if they are to reflect that underlying reality. This offers a powerful, test, independent of, and additional to the disciplinary ‘validation’ that may be undertaken. Such consilience tests, however, are all too rarely performed, and our accounts, rather than jump, or at least stand together, just simply hang together. Perhaps this is one of the many reasons why we – biologists and economists alike - often fail to reach our intended audience, to the detriment of the fisheries which would benefit from our accounts being given more credit than they usually are.

These then, are some of the thoughts I had while reading these proceedings; I hope they inspire other readers to think of consilient, cross-disciplinary, cooperation.

Daniel Pauly
Director, Fisheries Centre, UBC.