Building legitimacy of the recreational fishing sector in mixed commercial–recreational fisheries

To become legitimate fishery stakeholders alongside government and commercial interests, recreational fisheries must operate in accordance with the rules, principles, or standards established for sustainable fisheries. These rules fall within the following fisheries management processes: (i) assessment of stock status relative to target or reference points, (ii) control of either total fishing effort (input control) or total harvest (output control), and (iii) allocation of the harvest amongst stakeholders. Unfortunately, recreational fisheries are rarely subjected to the same standards as commercial fisheries. Aside from personal conservation ethics, there are no incentives for recreational fishers to meet any standards of catch reporting and assessment, limits on total fishery catch, and accounting for allocated catches. In contrast, commercial fisheries are often required to follow strict standards in each of the three management processes. This paper demonstrates how such differences often contribute to a series of “legitimacy gaps” when compared to commercial fisheries that limit the scope of harvest rights attainable by the recreational sector. We use an urban, recreational-commercial fishery for Dungeness crab (Cancer magister) in British Columbia, Canada, as a case study to demonstrate how discrepancies in requirements and responsibilities between the recreational and commercial sectors limit the scope of harvest rights attainable by the recreational sector. Reducing these discrepancies would help justify the changes to the management framework required to increase recreational access.