Fish Stories: Science, Advocacy, and Policy Change in New England Fishery Management

Once the poster child for government-sponsored overfishing, New England by 2005 had become a fishery conservation success story. This article develops and deploys a problem-definition framework to explain the dramatic shift from a permissive to a protective fishery management regime in New England. I argue that neither new and improved scientific information nor pressure from powerful commercial interests caused government officials to modify their approach to fishery management. Instead, environmentalists used lawsuits to threaten fishery managers' autonomy and thereby forced them to replace fishers' risk-tolerant definition of the problem with environmentalists' more precautionary one as the basis for management. Environmentalists had legal leverage because they were able to demonstrate convincingly a substantial discrepancy between what the agency's governing statute required and what managers actually did. Two factors were critical to environmentalists' success: a compelling and credible scientific story about the relationship between fishing and the health of fish stocks, and an explicit conservation requirement in the language governing fishery management.