Summary
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Policy Lab partnered with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and the Welsh Government to support the development of a new Fisheries Management Plan (FMP) for sea bass. Managing sea bass fisheries requires balancing environmental sustainability with the economic and cultural importance of fishing, yet existing approaches struggled to reconcile competing perspectives across fragmented stakeholder groups.
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Policy Lab presented the consolidated findings to Defra and the Welsh Government in January 2023. These findings directly informed the goals and actions of the sea bass FMP, published in December 2023 – including the establishment of the Bass Management Group as the first goal of the plan, providing the inclusive stakeholder engagement structure the project demonstrated was needed.
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Drawing on the lived experience of fishers, enforcement officers and fishmongers, the approach built trust and surfaced areas of consensus and disagreement. It demonstrated how inclusive, mixed-methods engagement can support more robust, workable and collective environmental policy.
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The project was selected as an example of co-design excellence and presented at the 2023 Westminster Food and Nutrition Forum as best practice in participatory policymaking.
The policy challenge
Sea bass fishing plays a significant role in coastal communities, contributing to livelihoods, local economies and cultural identity. Pressure on sea bass stocks has intensified the need for careful management to ensure long-term environmental and economic sustainability.
This presents a complex policy challenge. Commercial fishers, recreational anglers, conservation organisations, regulators and scientists often hold competing priorities and perspectives. These differences are compounded by low levels of trust amongst some stakeholders and a perception that they are excluded from decision-making. As a result, existing regulatory approaches have struggled to build consensus or legitimacy across the system.
The introduction of the Fisheries Act 2020 created both a requirement and an opportunity to develop Fisheries Management Plans that are evidence-based and widely supported. Defra and the Welsh Government partnered with Policy Lab to test whether a broad co-design approach could navigate this complexity and develop a more inclusive way of making policy.
Policy Lab worked with the programme to address a central question
How can we co-design a fisheries management plan for sea bass that balances environmental sustainability with the needs of diverse stakeholders, while building trust and consensus across the system?
What changed
Deeper and more visceral understanding of people’s experiences
Policy Lab embedded lived experience at the heart of the sea bass policy process through immersion in the lives of fishers, enforcement officers and fishmongers. We spoke to more than 90 individuals across 7 different locations in England and Wales, with our interactions ranging from full days to shorter interviews at pop-up events in fishing cafes and other locations frequented by recreational and commercial fishers.
Our researchers worked directly in fishing environments including joining recreational fishing trips, spending days in commercial ports, attending angling competitions and visiting fish markets. This enabled us to develop a vivid understanding of how sea bass fishing is experienced in practice – economically, socially and culturally – and how regulations affect day-to-day activity. The approach surfaced both shared challenges and points of tension across stakeholder groups, including differing views on access, sustainability and fairness.
These insights provided a grounded and human understanding of the system, highlighting where policy intent and lived reality diverged. They established a shared starting point for the engagement that followed, ensuring that subsequent policy development was rooted in the experiences and priorities of those directly affected.
Confidence with new practices, evidence and technologies
Policy Lab tested and expanded the lived experience research through a week-long online collective intelligence debate, hosted on Pol.is. Over 270 participants – including commercial and recreational fishers from across English and Welsh regions – contributed more than 670 statements and cast almost 140,000 votes across more than 100 sea bass topics, from bycatch to nursery areas.
The approach combined qualitative depth with broader participation, enabling the team to identify areas of consensus and disagreement across a much wider group than the in-person research alone could reach. It also helped move discussions beyond entrenched positions by creating a structured environment in which participants could see where views aligned and diverged across sectors and regions.
Stakeholders reported that the process supported more constructive dialogue between groups with historically conflicting perspectives. For policymakers, it demonstrated how participatory and mixed-methods approaches can generate robust, credible evidence in complex and contested policy areas, building confidence in new ways of working.
Importantly, the Pol.is debate identified a clear shared priority across stakeholder groups to maintain a healthy sea bass stock. The outputs and priorities emerging from the debate were then sense checked with Cefas scientists to ensure the findings were grounded in the best available scientific evidence. This helped confirm that the emerging priorities were science-led, while also demonstrating a genuine thread of consensus across stakeholder groups. That shared foundation subsequently informed the co-design workshops.
Systemic understanding and stronger links between policy and delivery
Insights from lived experience research and collective intelligence were brought together with stakeholders in 9 face-to-face and remote co-design workshops with over 70 participants drawn from commercial and recreational fishing sectors, science, environmental agencies and enforcement bodies. Workshops were deliberately kept small but diverse to encourage constructive discussion in a respectful and safe environment.
To make complex policy decisions tangible, Policy Lab partnered with playable systems expert Matteo Menapace to develop a scenario testing method. Participants were presented with FMP management scenarios and asked to vote on their preferred solutions, then engaged in discussion before having the opportunity to change their votes. Serious games incorporating challenge and solution cards enabled stakeholders to simulate decision-making, negotiate priorities and refine interventions together.
The workshops brought together participants with very different levels of policy knowledge, communication skills and literacy. The serious game was designed to create a more level playing field, using visual tools, simplified language, discussion prompts and tactile game elements so that all voices could be heard.
The same scenarios were replicated in an online survey that attracted over 470 responses, reaching stakeholders who could not attend a workshop. Findings were then tested in an expert workshop and a co-refine survey of 449 respondents, allowing the most promising options to be validated with a wider group.
By connecting lived experience directly to policy design and testing ideas in realistic conditions, the project strengthened the link between strategy and delivery. It moved policy development from abstract proposals to options that had been collectively explored, challenged and improved by those who would be affected by them.
Shared visions of success
Policy Lab consolidated findings from across the 4 methods into a set of co-designed proposals for sea bass management, presented to Defra and the Welsh Government in January 2023. These proposals directly informed the goals and actions of the sea bass Fisheries Management Plan, published in December 2023.
The first of the 9 goals in the published FMP is “inclusive stakeholder engagement structures to inform management of the bass fishery” – leading to the establishment of the Bass Management Group, which now meets quarterly to oversee the plan’s delivery. This responds directly to one of the project’s most consistent findings that fragmented engagement had undermined trust in previous regulation, and that an ongoing inclusive structure was needed to maintain it.
The project marked an important shift in how participatory policymaking could be approached within complex and contested policy areas, demonstrating the value of moving beyond traditional consultation towards more collaborative, deliberative and co-designed methods of engagement. In recognition of this innovative approach, the project was selected as an example of co-design excellence and presented at the 2023 Westminster Food and Nutrition Forum as a best-practice example of participatory policymaking.
By bringing together over 1,400 stakeholders across multiple methods and stages of engagement, the project created a more transparent and inclusive policymaking process. It established a shared evidence base, clarified areas of agreement and disagreement, and built trust across a previously fragmented stakeholder landscape.
For Defra and the Welsh Government, this provided a stronger foundation for decision-making, ensuring that policy options were grounded in both scientific evidence and lived experience, and tested with those affected. More broadly, the project demonstrated that even in highly contested policy areas, co-design can improve the design and implementation of policy, offering a model for future Fisheries Management Plans and other complex environmental challenges.