Integrated Salmon Dialogue Forum, year 3

Year 2009
Proponent Fraser Basin Council (08 LR 45)
Project type Governance
Project type Fisheries
FSWP funding source Living Rivers
Grant amount $39,822
Total project value $361,500
ID number 09-LR74-G

Location: Fraser River Basin, Basin wide

Project Summary

Overview
The Goals of the Forum are to:
a. Develop shared principles that have broad application across an integrated and sustainable salmon fishery, and relevant processes.
b. Enable broadly based interests connected with the salmon fishery to identify and address underlying issues.
c. Develop innovative possibilities to assist the diverse interests associated with the fishery to generate enduring solutions.
d. Build collaborative relationships, networks and partnerships through which different sectors will have an opportunity to express and advance concerns and interests, and explore how they might best create mutual value.
e. Stimulate and inform discussions within existing processes in ways that support and enhance the management of an integrated fishery.
f. Carry out the work of the Forum at two levels: a “high beam” - e.g., regional, policy, long term and a “low beam”, specific ground level, operational.

These Goals were agreed to by parties engaged in the Forum on January 29, 2007.  Work in the 2009/10 Fiscal Year will be guided by the same goals.  The project has a fundamental desired outcome of building trust, relationships and capacity, and focuses on four main topic areas:  i) Information/Getting past fighting over numbers; ii) Decision making; iii) Collaborative governance; iv) Value/Access/Markets.

Objectives
1. To increase public confidence in the sustainability of BC salmon fisheries by promoting monitoring and compliance regimes which account for all harvest related mortalities in a credible and transparent fashion.
2. To improve in-season fisheries decision making processes, approaches and tools to reduce the potential for conflict and address implications for fisheries access, through consideration of the information and issues that inform the entire decision making cycle.
3. To investigate, promote and where relevant implement collaborative governance approaches and structures that are multi-interest based and appropriately integrated across scales and with other existing processes. 
4. To support and facilitate efforts to enhance value from catch and generate options for accessing salmon resources.

Methods
The Integrated Salmon Dialogue Forum works through the incubation of new ideas/approaches/possibilities to issues facing the salmon fishery which can draw support across sectors and bring them forward to support and inform existing decision making structures, both within governments and sector based organizations. The Forum works to build new ideas and approaches on a platform whose foundation is a set of shared principles.

The Forum is a “place” for all participants “to do something different” and “to do it differently”, allowing parties to engage outside of government�s specific purpose consultative mechanisms in cross-sectoral conversations as partners.

The Forum exists as a place for each partner to articulate what interests it seeks to advance through its participation, and as such represents a place for all participants to make known the goals and interests it seeks to achieve.

Participants have agreed to make best efforts to work through their respective processes, agencies and organizations to give effect to any consensus reached in the forum, and to address any differences that emerge.


Final Results

This project is complete for 2009 and only spent a portion of their budget.  Quarterly Forum meetings were held to engage participants in open dialogue related to on-going and emerging issues and challenges in salmon management.  As an outcome of the 2008/09 ISDF, a Monitoring and Compliance (M&C) Panel has been created, the objective is to develop collaborative processes and tools to support resolution or improved decision making on challenging and complex monitoring and compliance issues.  The Panel includes DFO, MoE, FN, commercial and recreational representatives and is supported by S4S (S. Geiger) as the lead facilitator.  The Panel has met monthly since April 2009 and recently, in collaboration with DFO,  completed a draft Road Map Strategy for DFO’s monitoring and compliance program.