Audit of Management Recommendations 1

The overarching objective of the FarFish project is to provide knowledge, tools and methods to support responsible, sustainable and profitable EU fisheries outside European waters, both within the jurisdiction of non-EU nations as well as international waters. To achieve this, FarFish aims to develop practical, achievable and cost-effective fisheries management tools and advice. Among those tools are user-friendly guidelines on how to create management recommendations (MRs) within these fisheries, which builds on the concepts of results-based management, where responsibility for fisheries management is to a point transferred to resource users, provided that they meet with necessary requirements set forth by the authorities.

The FarFish project is designed to go through two iterations when designing and validating this approach, where first version guidelines for making MRs are developed, they are then tested by applying them to the FarFish CSs and the MRs are then audited by an independent third party. This report gives a summary of the audit in the first iteration. The audit will be used to improve the guidelines and ultimately the second version of the MRs.

The audit builds on the Audit Framework developed in the FP7 project EcoFishMan. The audit aims to create a basis for improving the guidelines for making MRs, the MR invitations and the MRs developed in the next iteration of the project, through a planned, independent, and documented evaluation to determine whether the MR is being implemented as agreed. The role of the auditor is to evaluate whether the contract between the authority and the operator has been fulfilled, in the sense that the outcome targets listed in the MR have been achieved. In this first audit, the MR for each case study is audited ex-ante, focusing on measuring the results of the MR, based on the indicators set for each of the outcome targets Two tasks are performed by the auditor at this stage, to conform with the provided documentation system and if data is available, and conduct a sensitivity analysis to establish a baseline for the evaluation of the performance in the second version of the MR.

All together the audit should provide a basis to improve and advance in the developed of the MRs in the next iteration of the FarFish project, enabling the operators to improve management goals and implementation strategies, tailoring management strategies to comply with policy requirements, while advancing their own objectives and making use of local knowledge and resources. Enabling responsive management with a clear documentation system and audit framework that allow for timely interventions and adaptive management.