Fisheries and Aquaculture Department

Step overview

After identifying which ‘issues’ (ecological, social, economic or institutional) require direct intervention, the next step is to develop a management system that will deliver successful outcomes. This requires clearly determining specifically what you want the fishery to achieve for each issue and why? These “operational objectives” need to be clear, measurable and directly linked to one or more of the high level objectives.

To ensure each operational objective is being achieved requires some way of measuring if the management system is working or not.  This involves having one or more indicators to measure performance plus having performance measures (limits, targets, thresholds etc.) that clearly describe what levels of the indicator define acceptable performance.  The operational objective, indicator and performance measure together form a package, none are useful without the other two.  

The other critical part of the management system is to determine what combination of management measures will most likely achieve each of the operational objectives given the available resources and any other constraints.  This involves assessing which of the current management arrangements have deficiencies or inefficiencies and identifying potentially better alternatives.  Each option should be evaluated based on their cost effectiveness, impact on risks and objectives, likelihood of adoption etc. to determine which is the most appropriate.

Key activities

	3.1 Determine operational objectives
	3.2 Indicator and Performance Measure selection
	3.3 Management option evaluation and selection

Main outputs

(i) development of a set of clear and appropriate operational objectives covering each of the issues that requires direct management

(ii) identification of one or more indicators and their associated performance measures that can be used to monitor the performance of each operational objective

(iii) selection of the most cost effective set of management arrangements designed to generate acceptable levels of performance for all operational objectives