Developing a strategic plan for fisheries resilience for a regional fishery management council

The challenge. A regional fishery management council faced shifting stock distributions, rising management uncertainty, an expanding body of scientific information to integrate, and a growing workload against fixed staff and budget resources. Its system was scientifically grounded but structurally overburdened and reactive. Leadership needed a strategic plan to focus limited resources on clear priorities over a five- to ten-year horizon.

Our approach. We structured the engagement in three phases: discovery, analysis, and strategic planning. Interviews, focus groups, and questionnaires captured input from 78 respondents, including council members and staff, advisory and scientific committee members, federal agency personnel, industry representatives, and non-governmental organizations. We benchmarked staffing, budgets, governance, and action timelines against peer councils and documented the council’s existing adaptive management approaches. SWOT, PESTLE, and root-cause analyses identified gaps in governance, stakeholder trust, workforce capacity, and adaptive capacity. A two-day strategic planning workshop then built consensus among council members and partners on new mission and vision statements and four strategic goals.

Outcomes.

• A holistic strategic plan to guide council activities toward resilient, efficient, and science-based fisheries management.
• An implementation roadmap with performance metrics for near-term (1–2 year) and long-term (3–5 year) actions across the council’s fishery management plans.
• Benchmarks against peer councils, highlighting specific opportunities for improvement.
• A clear link between the drivers of success and the council’s existing and alternative processes.

Why it matters. The plan gives the council a shared direction and a way to measure progress, so it can respond to the most current science and evolving fishery conditions instead of managing one issue at a time.