Evaluating Salmon Management Institutions: The Importance of Performance Measures, Temporal Scales, and Production Cycles

Management of renewable resources from an ecosystem perspective will require institutional changes. Management institutions will have to enhance their ability to learn, use what they learn, and promote more effective evaluation of performance. Development of appropriate management baselines is an important prerequisite to institutional learning and evaluation. Three important components of management baselines are biological performance measures, temporal scale of institutional evaluation, and natural environmental fluctuations in the ecosystems that produce Pacific salmon (Oncorhynchus spp.). Performance measures should broaden the traditional focus on harvest and economics to include measures of the condition of important ecological processes. Temporal scale will have to include the entire history of management institutions. Compressing the temporal scale and shifting baselines forward will create inevitable extinction of the resource. Natural cycles in production require flexibility in management programs and the development of realistic expectations.