Andrew is a post-doctoral researcher in North Carolina focused on population and conservation genetics in hydrothermal vent communities.
David is a graduate student in Florida. He studies the ecology and conservation of sharks.
Amy is a graduate student in North Carolina studying local ecological knowledge within small scale fisheries.
Chuck is a graduate student in North Carolina focusing on apex predators and how they interact with fisheries.
Lyndell is a graduate student in North Carolina, studying the feeding ecology of cownose rays.
Iris is a graduate student in Washington studying habitat use and feeding habits of juvenile Pacific salmon and herring in Puget Sound.
Michael is a graduate student in Maryland investigating the visual systems of mantis shrimp.
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By Amy Freitag, on March 22nd, 2011
The focus on community and informal rules that were found to frequently structure successful commons management made apparent that the word ‘policy’ needed to be expanded. Policy scholars now look beyond the official written laws, reports, and regulations that are often written by a central government to multi-scalar rules that govern the structure and behavior in a system (Ostrom 2005). They include non-written cultural norms, religious prescriptions, and community ethics that are often more strongly followed that written, formal rules (Berkes 2008). Along with a more broadly defined concept of policy, commons scholars also introduced a more broad definition of institution within which these policies are made and enforced. Much like policies, institutions can be governmental as well as religious, moral, or cultural. Hanna and Jentoft (1996) give an appropriately broad definition for natural resource institutions: “institutions represent the arrangements which people devise to control their use of the natural environment”. Ostrom (2005) promotes an institutional analysis in order to encompass these new conceptions of policy and institution. Her work recently earned the Nobel prize and is rapidly becoming the most used framework for policy analysis.
 Ostrom’s Institutional Analysis and Design (IAD) Framework is not specific for natural resources or even commons problems, but serves as a place to begin policy analysis for all sorts of policy problems, including education, gender relations, crime, and natural resources. A short description here does not fully describe the IAD framework – for that, refer to Ostrom’s 2005 book. To highlight a few pertinent features, the framework is centered around a decision-making arena called the action arena rather than on the formation of a particular policy. Inputs to the action arena include exogenous variables describing the biophysical characteristics, community factors, and existing rules relating the action arena in play. This action arena then interacts with action arenas at other levels of governance (operational, collective choice, constitutional, and super-constitutional) to form an outcome. The outcome is evaluated by some defined set of criteria and the process feeds back to become iterative. The main benefit of the framework is to allow for comparative studies between empirical studies by scholars around the world in many disciplines. Continue reading State of the Field: A New Type of Policy Analysis
By Amy Freitag, on March 10th, 2011
 A dream? tomschlueter.blogspot.com We as humans and especially here at SFS like to picture an ideal government and hope that as we learn more about science and political theory, government can take steps in that direction. By any measure, governance within the United States is far from meeting the theoretical ideal. Implementation and enforcement are often pointed at as more important factors than policy design in terms of effectiveness in meeting policy goals. But if we ever had the chance to change the design, here’s four principles that will help make sure we move in the right direction.
Addressing Scale: Appropriate information gathering
If scale is unified at the ecosystem level – bounded by hydrological and geophysical boundaries – then information about the system must also represent the ecosystem scale. Fisheries management, for example, requires information on all the potential factors that could affect stock size – habitat, water quality, fishing pressure, competition with other native and nonnative species, productivity of the food web, etc. Furthermore, the total fishery stock in an area would have to be considered together – total biomass of market species, for example. These types of measurements will delineate threats to conservation to a particular species versus threats to the health of the whole system. Continue reading Building Policies for Stewardship
By Amy Freitag, on March 8th, 2011
 Successful owl populations in CA are credited to adaptive management, from ceplacer.ucdavis.edu Following our discussion of scale, management boundaries must match ecological processes which are now recognized to be dynamic and complex. This means that management must manage not for a known equilibrium, but a dialectic system full of uncertainty (Berkes 2008). Instead of attempting to predict from the instigation of a policy what the effects may be, governance should be structured to constantly evaluate the system and incorporate feedbacks. This process, known as adaptive management (also check out statements on the subject from the Resilience Alliance and US Department of Interior), provides for the co-evolution of the system and its governance to ensure that they remain an effective match.
Under adaptive management, episodes of disturbance are learning opportunities, not a signal of policy failure. Berkes (2008) describes this phenomenon: “’conservation’ is not a state of being. It is a response to a people’s perceptions about the state of their environment and its resources, and a willingness to modify their behaviors to adjust to new realities”. He goes on to say that disturbances are not only opportunities for learning, but that they are necessary for that learning to occur. Gunderson and Carpenter (2006) add that disturbance is necessary for transformational learning – the type of learning that allows for the emergence of novelty. Therefore, disturbances should be allowed to occur in order to foster community and governmental innovation. Continue reading State of the Field: Playing with Policy
By Amy Freitag, on February 22nd, 2011
 What are the true costs of power? photo by author Ever wonder why coal-fired power is so much cheaper than the alternatives? Coal-producing communities aren’t paid for their personal health impacts, the environment is not paid for streams turned acid, and mountains are not paid for their removal. More subtle costs are also passed on: rising rates of asthma from particulates in the air, introduction of malaria into previously unaffected areas from a warming world, and the relocation of whole countries due to sea level rise.
Pollution is a classic example of an economic externality – companies choosing not to sequester chemicals in their effluent pass the cost of pollution and remediation on to those downstream. Therefore the cost of production signaled by price does not represent the true cost of production. The contradiction is deeper, however, and forms one of the main critiques of capitalism – the “second contradiction of capitalism”. Capitalism relies on the continual growth of the market, costs determined by the raw material and labor inputs. However, these costs assume limitless availability of what Marx calls “conditions of production” – the infrastructure and environmental services that are required for production. These, however, are not limitless and therefore not cost-free. Rising costs will eventually outpace price and production will therefore cease (O’Connor 1998). Continue reading State of the Field: Pay for that Particulate!
By Amy Freitag, on February 1st, 2011
 Even the Governator believes in public participation, thanks cdcr.ca.gov Continuing this series’ recent theme of ways to make policy work, let’s consider a broader view of what policy is and therefore who gets to create policy. It’s not just the elected officials with legislation in their job description. For one, those people are accountable to the people who elected them. Second, formal written policy is not the only kind that is effective – informal rules, community traditions, and other forms of policy are often best. Plus, these types of policy offer the general public a change to be involved in creation and implementation.
There is a large literature on the value of participation in policymaking, especially in fisheries (Silver and Campbell 2005). Here I will focus on three particularly important aspects of participation to management at the scale of an estuary, where I work: a) additional knowledge creation, b) community buy-in, and c) tighter feedback loops. These are important for relatively large-scale systems with several communities and many variables that could affect management. Continue reading State of the Field: Policy is not just for policymakers anymore
By Amy Freitag, on January 18th, 2011
 FDR, sometimes credited as a benevolent dictator, brought the US out of the Great Depression through his New Deal Effective management of any landscape or seascape must attend to context such as unique attributes of the ecosystem, local cultural values and norms, and broader governance constructs. Conservation managers often joke that the best way to incorporate this context is to install a benevolent dictator at the helm. His or her role would be to see the big picture and make decisions based on expected community benefits. Others would call the term benevolent dictator an oxymoron – but there have been some documented cases of such idealistic planning. Sadly, it seems such “high modernism” is not the answer. In his book Seeing Like A State, James Scott documents cases of agricultural land, cityscapes, and whole communities that ended up having unexpected consequences to high modernist rule due to incomplete foresight and incorrect prediction of people’s reactions. He cites these examples as warnings for the modern conservation movement as they choose between philosophies to move forward.
Continue reading State of the Field: Modergasm — The flaccid finality of modern erections
By Amy Freitag, on September 8th, 2010
  In 1954 and 1957 Gordon and Schaefer respectively described the idea of maximum sustainable yield (MSY) – that is, the amount of fish that could be taken by commercial fishing operations to maximize reproduction by the system year after year. Since then, it has been heralded as the mathematical panacea to fisheries management.
Gordon and Schaefer also described the maximum economic yield which threw price relations into the mix. It describes the point at which the fishers will make the most money, accounting for revenue and their expenses. Note in the graph below the fold that the maximum economic yield (MEY) is below the MSY in terms of effort. Gordon and Schaefer imagined a private manager or government overseer that could calculate the MEY and regulate fisher behavior in order to meet it. The idea was meant to be win-win for the fishers and the fish.
Continue reading Maximum (un)Sustainable Yield
By Amy Freitag, on July 15th, 2010
This is a reposting from our old website. I encourage you to take a look at the comments here before writing your own new ones.
Living among a community comprised largely of scientists and fishermen has recently made me wonder where the dividing line between scientist and citizen falls. A recent discussion at Science Online 2010 also raised the question of what is the role of the Ivory Tower in research? Should we consider the scientific community more broadly or is there really something to be said for the role of the ‘expert’ as certified by degrees and a corner office at an academic institution? Continue reading Beyond the Ivory Tower: Experts in the Masses
By Amy Freitag, on February 24th, 2010
I recently attended a public hearing for a proclamation in the state of North Carolina that proposed to ban large-mesh gill nets in two areas of the state’s estuaries where sea turtle encounters have recently increased. There’s a large back story to both sides of the case and a lot of emotional motivation on both sides, leaving science flattened in the wake of charismatic leaders promoting their personal values. In fact, science became a bit of a flattened tool, left on the ground until useful to pick up and brandish, like a much-forgotten sword cast aside until it’s in a handy spot mid-battle. The meeting started as a classic jobs versus the environment case, but a few hours into the public comment period, I began to realize why this particular meeting had attracted the attendance of well over 300 people. I wasn’t in Kansas anymore, but at the crossroads of some of the largest debates in commercial fishing.
 turtle release from the turtle hospital Continue reading Public fence-sitting then falling to one side
By Amy Freitag, on February 22nd, 2010
 picture courtesy of TerraSig I could write a hundred different kinds of reviews for Rebecca Skloot’s new book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and they would all be nothing but favorable. The book has three take-home points: informed consent, privacy issues, and race/class relations. One of the biggest things to note about the book, however, is the personal story of the author included in the book – the challenges included in doing ethnographic research. Yet it’s precisely this perspective that makes the book so spectacular, finally bringing Henrietta’s family the recognition they deserve. Recognition that remains the only thing they’ve ever asked for in return for their family’s donation and subsequent sacrifices.
Continue reading HeLa book review
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