Harvest strategies are an important part of achieving sustainable fisheries management, and their development is supported by an array of scientific tools and guidelines. By addressing many of the challenges related to harvest strategy design, these advancements have revealed significant barriers to uptake and implementation, even when the harvest strategy is clearly articulated. Despite the availability of tailored advice and a global emphasis on improving fisheries management, inertia to implementation of harvest strategies persists across various fishery contexts. Equally, fisheries may not be “harvest strategy ready”: there are issues that should first be addressed, or that will preclude or hinder harvest strategy implementation.
Here we take a broader social, economic, and political perspective to identify barriers to the process of harvest strategy development, implementation and uptake, and urge practitioners to document “failures” within this context. By laying out these barriers, we hope to provide practitioners with greater context, encouraging their due consideration to whether our identified issues are likely to be barriers in their fishery. Doing so can help identify where more effort needs to be dedicated and how to move forward. Harvest strategies will continue to fail in many contexts unless development and implementation barriers are acknowledged and overcome.