Sustainable development assessment and the management of heterogeneous fisheries’ activities: the case of European Union participation in Senegal’s marine fishery

The article provides policy guiding recommendations for enhancing the sustainable development of Senegal’s marine fishery system. A new sustainable development assessment method is proposed and is applied to Senegal’s marine fishery in order to provide these recommendations. A discussion of the conditions for sustainable development suggest that the sustainable development of fisheries is dependent upon complex interdependencies between heterogeneous factors. These interdependencies lead to the assumption that assessing the sustainable development status of fishery systems should rely upon descriptive multi-criterion assessments. The proposed multi-criterion assessment evaluates the sustainable development consequences of the activities of three user groups frequenting Senegal’s marine fishery. These groups are the local artisanal group, the local industrial group and the European Union distant water fleets which were present in Senegalese waters until June 2006. The results of this evaluation show that the heterogeneity of the user groups frequenting Senegal’s marine fishery system can be capitalised upon through allocating fishery access in accord with each group’s ability to generate sustainable development benefits, while taking policy action to mitigate their negative impacts. On the basis of these findings the article makes three key policy recommendations for the sustainable development of Senegals’s marine fishery. These recommendations provide for the presence of an EU fleet in Senegalese waters as a measure for contributing to the sustainable development of the fishery. This work was carried out with financial support from the Commission of the European Communities, specific RTD Programme ‘International Research in Co-operation’ (INCO-DEV), ‘Ecosystems, Societies, Consilience, Precautionary Principle: Development of an assessment method of the societal cost for best fishing practices and efficient public policies’ (ECOST).