Can Fisheries Agencies Learn from Experience?

The essential steps in learning from experience are documentation of decisions, evaluation of results, and organizational response to the evaluation. Learning is slow in fisheries management because of the difficulty of replication and control and, to a lesser extent, the variability of natural systems. Thus, it may take a long time to determine which kinds of management actions are best, and we stand a significant chance of making false conclusions about the efficacy of specific actions. Even when decisions are documented and evaluated, fisheries agencies have few mechanisms of institutional memory to retain the lessons learned. Agencies need to develop a systematic plan for learning, including listing of identified uncertainties, methods for resolving the uncertainty, how to evaluate existing actions, and mechanisms for retaining the lessons learned in the institutional memory.