The field of fisheries management has recently undergone a
paradigm shift. Traditional fisheries management assumed that
the productivity of fish populations was largely independent of
the physical environment and social-ecological changes. Fisheries
management models assumed that the recruitment of new fish
could be predicted based on the size of the adult population and
that the size of a fish population could be manipulated through
fishing pressure. Consequently, for close to 100 years fisheries
management has focused on regulating fishing pressure through,
for example, the number of boats, the size of fishing nets, and the
setting of a total allowable catch (Pauly et al. 2002, Bavington
2009). The new paradigm, known as an ecosystem approach to
fisheries, recognizes that fisheries are social-ecological systems
shaped over time by human activities that are both the cause and
result of ecological change (Wilson 2006).
In the northern Benguela, Namibian fishing vessels target two
species of hake, Merluccius capensis and Merluccius paradoxus.
This fishery commenced in the 1950s but remained insignificant
until the arrival in 1964 of distant-water fleets that exploited the
hake resources beyond the sustainable limit (Sumaila and
Vasconcellos 2000, Roux and Shannon 2004). Catches peaked in
1972 at over 800,000 tonnes followed by a rapid decline (Fig. 1).
When Namibia gained independence in 1990, catch limits were
drastically reduced to 60,000 tonnes, “to allow the stock to
recover” (Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources 2004:2).
Some 20 years later, hake spawning stock biomass is considered
to be at about 80% of values in 1990 and 12% of values in 1964
(Kirchner et al. 2012), a level that the Food and Agriculture