POLICY AND PRACTICE REVIEWS article
Front. Mar. Sci.
Sec. Global Change and the Future Ocean
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmars.2025.1625861
FishPoll -A serious game about sharing moving fish stocks under climate change
Provisionally accepted
- 1Akvaplan niva AS, Tromsø, Norway
- 2UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway
- 3Nofima, Tromsø, Norway
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Climate change is driving shifts in fish stock distributions, creating challenges for transboundary fisheries governance and quota allocation. Traditional negotiation processes often fail to achieve consensus among stakeholders, leading to geopolitical tensions and unsustainable resource use. To address this, we introduce FishPoll, an innovative serious game designed to simulate the complexities of quota negotiations under changing ecological conditions in a fictional scenario. FishPoll provides a structured, yet flexible, role-playing environment where participants take on the roles of coastal state representatives, negotiating catch allocations based on shifting stock distributions. The game incorporates a dynamic "sliding scale" mechanism that transitions quota allocation from historical rights to zonal attachment, offering a realistic and interactive framework for decision-making.Through structured gameplay and facilitated discussions, FishPoll simulates quota negotiations to illustrate the consequences of participants failing to reach consensus. Thereby, the game fosters collaborative problem-solving, policy exploration, and stakeholder engagement in fisheries management. Furthermore, it encourages discussions about allocation agreements. Playtesting with scientists and policymakers demonstrated that FishPoll enhances understanding of allocation challenges, stimulates constructive dialogue, and serves as a practical tool for research, education, and stakeholder training. Hence, FishPoll may contribute to the discourse on the tragedy of the commons while offering a valuable addition to previous intervention games. FishPoll represents a novel application of serious gaming in fisheries governance, bridging the gap between scientific modelling and real-world negotiation dynamics.
Keywords: Participatory approach, TAC sharing, quota negotiation, resource management, global change, decision-making, Experiential learning
Received: 09 May 2025; Accepted: 15 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Weber, Aschan, Szczepanska and Olsen. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Michaela Aschan, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway
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