Towards sustainable fisheries: A multi-criteria participatory approach to assessing indicators of sustainable fishing communities: A case study from Cartagena (Spain)

The fishery system involves a complex relationship between humans and natural resources that is a challenge to analyze. Moreover, government policies are generally not efficient in resolving this complexity and ensuring the sustainable development of fisheries. This paper develops an integrated multicriteria participatory assessment framework involving the evaluation of Ecological, Economic, Social, Technological, Ethical and Institutional dimensions of sustainability. It analyzes the relative importance of each dimension and its indicators, modifying the published 'Rapfish' technique. The analysis is employed as a decision-making tool to analyze and evaluate multiple relations and dimensions under a participatory group decision-making protocol. An allied soft methodology, cognitive mapping, can be used to assess the perceived linkage among indicators. The methodology is applied to a case study of the fishing community of Cartagena (Spain).