Post by Caleb Aldridge.—This is an abstract of a recent presentation given at the Southern Division AFS meeting. Co-authored with Leandro E. Miranda and Michael E. Colvin.

Goals translate vision statements and stakeholder desires into an imperative by which state fisheries agencies steward public resources. Goals vary considerably in wording and scope, but core themes maintain stability from state to state. An understanding of goal themes and the geographic variation in goal themes can be useful for agency personnel seeking to define or refine their own goals.

We gathered and screened publicly available agency documents and made notes on the characteristics of shared and unique agency-wide management goals for 31 contiguous state inland fisheries agencies. We identified nine goal themes (below), then reviewed each set of documents by state and assigned an ordinal quality of representation score for each goal theme. In a 1970s study spatial groupings were evident but in our study we were unable to clearly distinguish a spatial component to goal theme groupings.

We cannot be certain to the exact mechanism in goal theme patterns but believe that advances in communication and information exchange has been influential in blurring geographical lines, as well as funding mechanisms from goverment agencies. Our findings suggest that agency personnel are likely to find shared goals beyond the borders of neighboring states.