Abstract
Professionally facilitated multi-stakeholder meetings of marine mammal Take Reduction Teams, such as the Harbor Porpoise Take Reduction Team, are mandated by the U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972. These meetings employ consensus-based decision-making to create policies to safeguard marine mammals. This opportunistic case study examines the history of the Harbor Porpoise Take Reduction Team multi-stakeholder group, and policy decisions the team made to address harmful interactions between harbor porpoises and the New England and mid-Atlantic groundfish fishery. For more than a decade, stakeholders regularly met to create regulations designed to mitigate the accidental entanglement of harbor porpoises in gillnets, called bycatch. A series of disruptions, including a new political appointee and the addition of new team members, altered how stakeholders interacted with one another and how regulations were implemented. These shocks to the formerly well-functioning team, placed the future of consensus-based policy creation at risk. Lessons from this case study can be applied to increase understanding of how multi-stakeholder methods, which are incorporated into many regulatory decision-making processes operate in practice and illustrate the fragile nature of long-standing consensus.
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Acknowledgments
Many thanks to the interview respondents for taking the time to participate in this research. The authors also are grateful to Marine Mammal Commission and the Kenan Institute for Ethics for partial funding of this research. Many thanks to D. Crow for her review and comments.
Compliance with ethical standards
This study received approval from Duke University’s Institutional Review Board (IRB) for Non-Medical Research on Human Subjects as exempt research. All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
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McDonald, S.L., Rigling Gallagher, D. A Story About People and Porpoises: Consensus-Based Decision Making in the Shadow of Political Action. Environmental Management 56, 814–821 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-015-0545-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-015-0545-6