Intra-Sectoral Conflict Resolution in Recreational Fisheries: A Brief Review of Approaches and Strategies

Recreational fishing is a globally popular leisure activity with diverse participants and practices that may lead to conflicts over competing values. Conflicts may affect participation, management, and conservation, yet the degree to which their occurrence and scale have been examined in the primary and secondary literature remains unknown. Here, we reviewed conflict resolution literature related to hunting and fishing to identify strategies for navigating or avoiding conflicts in recreational fisheries. We examined the extent to which those strategies have been applied in three North American recreational fisheries intra-sectoral conflict case studies. Approaches to conflict resolution, prevention and management in the reviewed literature fell into one of three categories: improving situational understanding, collaborative governance, and legal intervention. Collaboration and knowledge sharing approaches—examples of collaborative governance—were the most recommended in the literature but were only applied to conflicts retroactively in the case studies we examined. In contrast, legal intervention—though least recommended as a useful conflict resolution strategy in the literature—was used in each case study. Our findings highlight gaps between recommendations made in the relevant literature on conflict resolution and the management practices employed in real world cases of recreational fisheries conflict, suggesting opportunities for improved collaborative governance and knowledge sharing within organizational structures to better address intra-sectoral (in some cases, manager-angler) conflicts.