Arctic Fisheries Devising Seminar: Summary Report

The Arctic Fisheries Devising Seminar brought together 23 people from a wide variety of stakeholder groups to wrestle with these questions. Participants included high-level government policy-makers from various states, regions, and territories, namely Canada, the European Union (EU), the Faroe Islands, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the United States; experienced government scientists; key representatives from non-governmental organizations, scientific organizations, and industry; distinguished representatives from Arctic indigenous peoples; and highly regarded scholars and Arctic experts. Participants came with an extremely impressive set of credentials and affiliations. They were asked to engage on equal footing as individuals rather than in their official capacity, and to help generate ideas that would be acceptable to their own constituencies while concurrently addressing the concerns of other stakeholder groups. That is, they were invited to participate in an informal, off-the-record problem-solving exercise. To this end, no comments are attributed to individual participants, nor is anyone identified by name. Instead, this summary reports on the topics introduced, the good ideas that emerged, and points of convergence and divergence among the group.