Stresses and Mind-sets in Fishery Management

This paper reviews the evolution of fishery management as a field of crossdisciplinary inquiry and suggests that each participating discipline tends to be attracted to its own range of explanatory theories and to its own stock of relevant data. Impacts of fishery failure are experienced at different levels of society, each suggesting a different approach to remedial action. The fishery collapse in Atlantic Canada should be studied from a comparative perspective in order to gather ideas on how to cope more effectively with the socio-economic consequences. Above all, however, the disaster should be seen as an unprecedented challenge for the fishery management experts in Canada to integrate their mindsets despite the intellectual stresses inherent in the field.