Managing Risk, Resisting Management: Stability and Diversity in a Southern Australian Fishing Fleet

At Lakes Entrance, in Victoria (Australia), locally-based commercial fishers utilize diversification (e.g. multiple targets, fishing areas, boats, or markets) as a means of managing the risks that characterize the biological and economic environments they experience. These strategies have contributed to numerical stability of the local fleet at a time when most southeastern Australian fishing fleets are in decline. In effect, the Lakes Entrance fishing community has avoided, or at least delayed, outcomes that are explicitly intended by recent approaches to fisheries management. An implication of these observations is that the behavior of fishers, including, importantly, how they manage risk, offer lessons for fisheries managers with respect to both why their plans often fail and why different plans could be more successful.