Incentive-based approaches to sustainable fisheries

The failures of traditional target-species management have led many to propose an ecosystem approach to fisheries to promote sustainability. The ecosystem approach is necessary, especially to account for fishery-ecosystem interactions, but by itself is not sufficient to address two important factors contributing to unsustainable fisheries: inappropriate incentives bearing on fishers and the ineffective governance that frequently exists in commercial, developed fisheries managed primarily by total-harvest limits and input controls. We contend that much greater emphasis must be placed on fisher motivation when managing fisheries. Using evidence from more than a dozen natural experiments in commercial fisheries, we argue that incentive-based approaches that better specify community and individual harvest or territorial rights and price ecosystem services and that are coupled with public research, monitoring, and effective oversight promote sustainable fisheries.

Motherhood plans among young Australian women - Who Wants children these days?

Fertility rates in the developed world have been below replacement level for 25 years, and it is often assumed that this results from deliberate, unconstrained individual choice. Data from 7448 childless women aged 22 to 27, participating in the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women's Health, indicate that 9 per cent aspire to childlessness, with 72 per cent wanting I or 2 children and 19 per cent more. Differences in psychological functioning disappear after adjustment for socioeconomic variables. Women wanting 1 or 2 children also want paid work, while those wanting many children generally have traditional aspirations. Policy-makers need to consider strategies that support women to negotiate motherhood and paid work.

Sustainable tourism planning: A content analysis of local tourism plans

Tourism planning has been advocated by many as a possible means of alleviating some of the negative impacts of tourism. While a number of approaches have evolved, tourism planning based on the philosophies of sustainability has emerged as the most comprehensive approaches. To investigate the tourism planning approaches of local tourism destinations in Queensland, particularly the extent to which tourism plans exhibit the sustainable approach to tourism planning, 30 local tourism planning documents have been reviewed. Despite claims that sustainable tourism planning is one of the most accepted approaches the study has shown that this is not necessarily the case in practice. It was found that although a number of plans addressed the issue of sustainability, the subsequent strategies and actions suggest that the sustainable approach is not the dominant planning approach, but in fact the economic and infrastructure approaches are the primary planning methods.