摘要：Insufficient and unrepresentative participation in voluntary public hearings and policydiscussions has been problematic since Aristotle's time. In fisheries, research has shown that involvementis dominated by financially resourceful and extreme-opinion stakeholders and tends to advantage groupsthat have a lower cost of attendance. Stakeholders may exhibit only one or all of these traits but can be stillsimilarly advantaged. The opposites of these traits tend to characterize the disadvantaged, such as themiddle-ground opinions, the less wealthy or organized, and the more remote stakeholders. Remoteness ordistance is the most straightforward and objective of these characteristics to measure. We analyzed theNew England Fishery Management Council's sign-in sheets for 2003–2006, estimating participants' traveldistance and associations with the groundfish, scallop, and herring industries. We also evaluated therepresentativeness of participation by comparing attendance to landings and permit distributions. Thedistance analysis showed a significant correlation between attendance levels and costs via travel distance.These results suggest a potential bias toward those stakeholders residing closer to meeting locations, possiblydisadvantaging parties who are further and must incur higher costs. However, few significant differenceswere found between the actual fishing industry and attendee distributions, suggesting that the geographicaldistribution of the meeting attendees is statistically similar to that of the larger fishery. The interpretationof these results must take into consideration the limited time span of the analysis, as policy changes mayhave altered the industry make-up and location prior to our study. Furthermore, the limited geographicalinput of stakeholders may lend bias to the Council's perception of ecological and social conditionsthroughout the spatial range of the fishery. These factors should be further considered in the policy-formationprocess in order to incorporate a broader range of stakeholder input
关键词：fisheries policy; New England; voluntary participation
