SOCIOEC – Socio-economic effects of management measures of the future CFP – overview on a new European FP 7 project

The EU FP 7 project "SOCIOEC" started in March 2012 and this paper gives an overview on the main research questions and first results. SOCIOEC is an interdisciplinary project bringing together scientists from several fisheries sciences with industry partners and other key stakeholders to work on solutions for future fisheries management that can be implemented at a regional level. The first step will be to develop a coherent and consistent set of management objectives, which will address ecological, economic and social sustainability targets. The objectives should be consistent with the aims of the CFP, MSFD and other EU directives, but they should also be understandable by the wider stakeholder community and engage their support. This will then lead to the proposal of a number of potential management measures, based on existing or new approaches. The second step will be to analyze the incentives for compliance provided by these measures examining fisher’s responses and perceptions based on historical analysis as well as direct consultation and interviews. This project part will also examine how the governance can be changed to facilitate self- and co-management to ensure fishers buy-in to promising management measures. Finally, the project will examine the impacts of the management measures that emerge from this process, particularly in terms of their economic and social impacts. The IA analysis will be integrated by evaluating the proposed measures against the criteria of effectiveness, efficiency and coherence. Special attention will be paid to the evaluation of the proposed management measures’ performance in terms of their ability to achieve the general and specific ecological objectives.