Abstract

Designed by researchers affiliated primarily with the University of Florida, University of Washington and The World Bank, the FPIs are a broadly applicable and flexible tool for assessing performance in individual fisheries and for establishing linkages between enabling conditions, management strategies and the outcomes of sustainability-based indicators. The FPIs include 67 measures to assess wealth accumulation on 11 dimensions of stock and harvest/post-harvest industry performance, and 54 measures of enabling factors — including management and governance — to associate with variation in outcomes. A major advantage of the FPIs is their ability to establish meaningful comparisons across fishery systems characterized by different species, management regimes and socio-economic contexts. They are also ideal for cross-country comparisons of fishery systems that exploit biological resources sharing similar characteristics. Consisting initially of 61 case studies drawn from industrial and developing countries around the world, the FPI database has expanded considerably in the last few years. In addition, the FPIs are currently being used by institutions such as The World Bank to evaluate the impact of fishery management reform in recipient countries. More recently, the FPIs were adopted by the Environment for Development (EFD) Collaborative Program on the Sustainable Management of Marine Resources to evaluate a new set of fisheries around the world, including the Caribbean region. The goal of this study is to introduce the FPIs to the Caribbean context and to explain the potential for collaborative partnerships with managers and academics from the region in order to carry out joint evaluations of the most important Caribbean fisheries. As an example of potential applications, we evaluate the case of artisanal queen conch fishery in the Colombian Caribbean.

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