SOCIOEC

Title: Socio economic effects of management measures of the future CFP

Summary: SOCIOEC is an interdisciplinary, European wide project bringing together scientists from several fisheries science disciplines with industry partners and other key stakeholders to work in an integrated manner on solutions for future fisheries management that can be implemented at a regional level. The central concept is to provide a mechanism for developing measures that are consistent with the overarching sustainability objectives of the EU, and that can provide consensus across all stakeholders.

The first step will be to develop a coherent and consistent set of management objectives, which will address ecological; economic and social sustainability targets. The objectives should be consistent with the aims of the CFP, MSFD and other EU directives, but they should also be understandable by the wider stakeholder community and engage their support. This will then lead to the proposal of a number of potential management measures, based on existing or new approaches.

The second step will be to analyze the incentives for compliance provided by these measures. In particular, we will examine fishers' responses and perceptions of these measures, based on historical analysis as well as direct consultation and interviews. This project will also examine how the governance can be changed to facilitate self- and co-management to ensure fisher buy-in to promising management measures. In particular, the project will focus on the interpretation of overarching (i.e. EU) objectives in local and regional contexts.

Finally, the project will examine the impacts of the management measures that emerge from this process, particularly in terms of their economic and social impacts. The IA analysis will be integrated by evaluating the proposed measures against the criteria of effectiveness, efficiency and coherence. Special attention will be paid in evaluating the proposed management measures performance in terms of their ability to achieve the general and specific ecological objectives.

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