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Arthur Bull Director Fundy Fixed Gear Council and the Marine Resource Center Cornwallis, Digby County Nova Scotia   ISSUES POSITION CONTRIBUTION   A. INTRODUCTION Community-based management (CBM) is one of the most significant emergent trends in the fisheries today. Fisheries groups in Canada and elsewhere are trying new approaches to management based on increased responsibility for management. As these efforts move forward it has become increasingly clear that CBM will require appropriate and relevant knowledge bases and that the research needed to develop these knowledge bases will be a major part of CBM. This paper will look at some aspects of the relationship between research and CBM. This paper is based on the experience of the Fundy Fixed Gear Council (FFGC) in developing and implementing a CBM research plan approach over three years (1996-1998). The FFGC is the management board responsible for fixed gear groundfish fishery in the Bay of Fundy area of Nova Scotia. When quotas were distributed by area in 1996, the fishermen in this region saw it as an opportunity to move toward a greater role in the management of local fishery. This required a major organizational development effort aimed at establishing accountable decision making processes and structures. Among these were the establishment of … a management board gear committees (handline, longline , gillnet) to manage each fishery through the season an infractions committee to ensure compliance with the plan and impose sanctions where necessary a licensing committee to deal with licensing and membership issues a research and advisory committee From the beginning, the FFGC saw research as an important part of its work. The research and Advisory Committee was formed, made up of DFO scientists, researchers, community members and environmentalists, to assist the FFGC in developing its research plan. In the first two years the FFGC undertook the following research projects length frequency measuring and otolith removal as part of stock assessments a fleet profile describing the fleet and past fishing patterns in the area a survey of fishermen regarding marine protected area (Funded by the World Wildlife Fund) development of a GIS capacity (funded by the Gulf of Maine Council) research in to models of CBM in other area. Each of these project made a positive contribution to the FFGC's work in this period. Above all they established research as an important part of its mandate. At the same time, the FFGC felt that the results were somewhat inconclusive and it was not always easy to see how the data assisted the CBM . This was due to a number of factors lack of focus, i.e. it was not clear why we were ding a particular project lack of coordination, the projects were not well connected to each other, or to the management decision making process lack of funds, there was not enough staff time to follow through on every project. Taken together these factors pointed to the need for more reflection and deliberation about how research relates to CBM. In particular the committee felt that we needed to answer come fundamental questions about how research fits into CBM: WHY are we doing research as part of CBM? WHAT KINDS of research are most relevant to CBM? HOW can we do this research? WHO else should we be working with to help us with this task? The rest of this paper will give an outline of some possible answers to these questions, in the hope that they will stimulate further debate and discussion .   B. WHY IS RESEARCH PART OF CBM? To answer this question we must fist look at the principles which underlay CBM, as well as the kinds of activities that CBM entails. For the FFGC the basic principles were that that fishermen and their communities have the primary role in the stewardship of the resource management should be based on an ecological approach to management taking into account interactions between species, habitat, fishing patterns and community life. management should be based on democratic, transparent decision making processes management should aim at both economic viability and biological sustainability These principles were applied to three main areas of activities: management - the management of the fishing plan ecological - ensuring that the resource economic - ensuring that there fishery is economically viable. The FFGC's research focussed primarily on the ecological aspect of its work, although there was considerable time and effort spent on researching other models of CBM. (The FFGC is only now embarking on economic research on markets and prices etc.) The question remains: Why should research be part of this work? This question raises another question which must be asked first: Why not rely on existing kinds of fisheries research? Certainly there is no lack of fisheries research to draw upon. A superficial list of kinds of fisheries reach might include Biological research, e.g. spawning behavior or growth patterns of a species Ecological research, e.g. species interactions, food webs, habitat, pop dynamics Physical oceanography, e.g., currents, tides, substrate Social, e.g. the sociological perspective on fisheries and their communities Economic, e.g. the economic analysis of fisheries With all this fisheries research going on, why not just draw on it for our CBM needs? Clearly if we are going to go to the time, trouble and expense of doing local research we need to have a very good sense of why it is necessary. For the FFGC, concluded there are a number of reasons why it needed to be involved in research. In summery these are that … CBM required knowledge on a scale that is more detailed than any current research CBM required a participatory approach to research , in keeping with principle 1) above, fishermen will have to play the primary role in research. This means not just gathering data for scientists, but participating in every phase of the research cycle including formulating questions, planning projects, gathering and collating data and evaluating the results. CBM will probably pose different kinds of question than other research that are specific to specific local management decisions, that will draw primarily on traditional ecological knowledge CBM will require timely and responsive research which will produce useful to immediate management questions CBM require an integrated, multidisciplinary approach to research that combines different knowledge bases. This is much easier to do at a local level. Taken together , these factors point to research as a kind of feed back loop which is an integral part of the management cycle. That CBM requires its own research initiatives in no way implies that it will not draw on other kinds of research. Neither does it imply that fishermen's knowledge is in some way superior to orthodox scientific fisheries knowledge. It does however point to the need for CBM-related research plans to be formally grounded in the its own management needs, just as DFO research is grounded in the centralized management system. Once this grounding has been established then it is possible to develop much productive and partnerships with other kinds of research bodies and institutions. These partnership will be touched on again n the following section..   C. HOW CAN LOCAL GROUPS DO THEIR OWN RESEARCH? For a local fishermen's organization to take on the work of developing and implementing a research plan, will require a significant amount of capacity-building at the community level. The main kinds of capacities are human, organizational, technical, physical and financial.   ORGANIZATIONAL The key question for any CBM-related research plan is: How does this research relate to what we are trying to achieve? We can spend a lot of time doing interesting research and collecting data which is not directly related to our management decisions. In order to answer this question we will need the organizational capacity to make decisions about research questions at the level of the management board itself. Once the research priorities are established research committees, advisory committees or specific project reference groups can also play a role in planning, overseeing, evaluating and coordinating research projects.   HUMAN Research plan will also require the participation of people in the local community, either fishermen or other community members who have the skills knowledge and awareness to undertake the research project. To develop this pool of local expertise will require a major training component. Every research plan should have a related training plan.   TECHNICAL In some cases there will be a need for technical facilities and equipment to do CBM-related research. For example, GIS capacity is emerging as major tool for CBM and require considerable technical capabilities. Similarly in some fisheries, especially shellfish, there will be a need to establish lab testing facilities.   PHYSICAL Closely associated with the technical capacity is the need for office, equipment such a phone fax as base for research activities.   FINANCIAL Research cannot be done purely by volunteers and in most cases organizational dues will not cover the costs of research. The group therefore should develop the capacity raise funds and establish partnerships which will ensure that it has access to adequate resources. On some areas the idea of marine resource center has emerged as a way to develop these and other kinds of capacities so that they are available to a wide range of marine related organizations and businesses in the region. Even if an organization develops all of these kinds of capacities, in most cases it will be hard to undertake the research requirements needed for CBM without establishing partnerships beyond the community. These might include: government scientists, e.g. DFO science universities other CBM related agencies involved with CBM Once a local group has a well-established plan which places research firmly into the context of CBM, these partnership will play a vital part n its overall research plan.   D. CONCLUSION This paper has provided a rough sketch of some of the way that research relates to CBM. More reflection and dialogue will be required to complete the picture. The FFGC's experience in attempts to do research does point to some key characteristics which may be part of a CBM-related research plan. These are that, in the context of CBM, research should be: participatory, involving resource users in all phases of the research process integrated, combining different disciplines and traditional ecological knowledge responsive, keyed to the knowledge needed for making local management decisions linked, with good working partnerships with other scientists and researchers