The basis for benefit sharing in fisheries policy: bold promises and missed opportunities for Australian fisheries

Fisheries public policy is necessarily built on multiple policy goals that reflect the intent to manage resource use within ecologically sustainable constraints while also delivering beneficial social, cultural and economic outcomes. However, who has standing, who are the intended beneficiaries of these outcomes, and who is affected is rarely named beyond ‘the community’ or ‘the industry’. The resulting dearth in direction for constituency, benefit sharing and distributional mechanisms can lead to a range of unintended consequences, including benefit hoarding by key private actors with negligible or only indirect community net benefit derived. Through content analysis of policy frameworks for Australia’s managed fisheries, combined with assessments of social and economic performance for selected cases which include cases of ‘super-profit’ fisheries, we examine the implications of policy design and goal ambiguity for benefit sharing. We then propose a benefit pathway conceptual model for conceiving of the policy means that determine the distributional outcomes of fisheries management to assist policy communities in matching policy goals and more operational objectives to policy means.