Integrating Management Strategy Evaluation into fisheries management: advancing best practices for stakeholder inclusion based on an MSE for Northeast U.S. Atlantic herring

The New England Fishery Management Council used Management Strategy Evaluation (MSE) to evaluate possible harvest control rules for Atlantic herring, the first MSE in the U.S. and perhaps globally to use open-invitation, public workshops for input. Stakeholder inclusion can increase both realism and likelihood of use by managers, but inclusivity is not achieved easily. Here, self-selected participants had diverse backgrounds and differing levels of interest and preparedness. We describe some challenges with directly engaging the public in MSE and offer broader insights for obtaining effective public participation during a decision-making process. Conducting an open MSE aligns well with publicly-driven management but requires clear goals and communication. Investment in effective organizers, impartial facilitators, and knowledgeable analysts can improve communication and understanding of MSE, to the betterment of fisheries management. We aim to further MSE best practices on integrating stakeholders and hope that our lessons learned on communication, engagement, and integration of MSE into an existing management arena will be useful to other practitioners.The accepted manuscript in pdf format is listed with the files at the bottom of this page. The presentation of the authors' names and (or) special characters in the title of the manuscript may differ slightly between what is listed on this page and what is listed in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript; that in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript is what was submitted by the author