Managing Rapana in the Black Sea: Stakeholder workshops on both sides

•An ecosystem approach can combine ecological, socio-economic and implementation issues.•MCA helped to make the participants think in terms of alternatives and trade-offs.•Not all stakeholders come to a workshop with the intention to reach a solution.•The approach only works if stakeholders have the intention to reach a solution.•It is important to transfer ownership of the process from experts to stakeholders.

Rapana venosa is a non-indigenous invasive predator on bivalves in the Black Sea. A Rapana fishery has developed in the Black Sea since the 1980s, primarily in Turkey and Bulgaria. The Rapana fishery provides a complex management problem with three groups of objectives: 1. Good economic status; 2. Good environmental status and 3. Cost of implementation. To address the various conflicting objectives of this management problem an ecosystem approach was taken to analyze the problem. Stakeholder workshops were set up in Varna (Bulgaria) and Samsun (Turkey) to discuss and evaluate management alternatives based on environmental (MSFD), economic and implementation objectives. Workshops were attended by fishers, factory owners, nature conservation NGOs, biologists and government representatives. In these workshops multi-criteria analysis was used to communicate information on trade-offs between objectives to generate feedback from the stakeholders. This proved useful as a means to retrieve information from the stakeholders and to identify areas of consensus and conflict. Although the process differed substantially between the Bulgarian and Turkish case studies both workshops showed limited conflict between environmental status and socio-economic status. Analysis showed that the real-trade-off was between these two objectives and the cost of implementation both in terms of monetary expense as in terms of resistance from stakeholders.