Compliance Program Evaluation and Optimisation in Commercial And Recreational Fisheries

Measuring compliance and the effectiveness of law enforcement can be difficult, since people engaging in illegal behaviour can, and do, go to great lengths to hide their activities. While detection of a breach can indicate the effectiveness of an enforcement program, detecting no breaches can mean there are no offences occurring, or that the enforcement program is deficient in some way; this is the perennial problem analysts face when dealing with compliance data.

Extending on work already undertaken in the western rock lobster fishery, this project aims to develop data collection, analysis, and reporting protocols for all Western Australian recreational and commercial fisheries. It is anticipated that these protocols will provide a basis for developing national compliance monitoring standards using Western Australia as a model.

This project will develop meaningful compliance performance indicators in order to ensure that industry is not over or under-serviced, and that government-funded enforcement activities are optimally allocated. Use of such data promotes 'clever policing‘, in that activities can be targeted toward those areas within a fishery where non-compliance seems problematic.

The systematic collection, analysis, and reporting of data on enforcement activities will provide enforcement personnel, fishery managers and industry with the information required to ensure enforcement effort is allocated to optimise the level of compliance in the fishery. Currently, there are few systems in place for formally assessing how levels of compliance in different fisheries change over time, or how changes might relate to the effectiveness of enforcement activities.

Spatial and temporal patterns of non-compliance will be identified, and strategies developed for improving the cost-effectiveness of enforcement activities.

Industry will be involved in planning, and periodically reviewing, compliance programs. In Western Australia this has occurred in the Rock Lobster and Pearl Oyster Fisheries, with other managed fisheries to follow. Feedback from such compliance reviews should be used to detect and correct deficiencies in compliance activities.

Time: FRDC project was funded until March 2004, but data collection is ongoing.