Hunter Snyder, PhD

My Research

Hunter Snyder is an American scientist whose work in the Arctic addresses human behavior in fisheries and energy policy and planning. He is a Research Scientist at the Thayer School of Engineering and a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Arctic Studies at Dartmouth College.

Broadly, his research uses concepts from the behavioral sciences to improve our knowledge about how people make decisions. Specifically, he studies energy use in fisheries and fishing communities, and he develops tools to address regulatory and human behavioral barriers to reducing energy consumption.

Fishery Observers Address Arctic Fishery Discards

Environmental Research Letters, 2021

Fishery observer programs are a promising enforcement tool to curtail undesirable discarding of living marine resources. Globally, 8% of all catches are estimated to be discarded. Discards not only undercut a fishers’ bottom line and state tax revenues; they also constrain the long-term reproductive — and in turn economic value, of a fishery. Fishery observers may help achieve conservation goals of eradicating waste, but there remains considerable uncertainty regarding the conservation benefits of fishery observers for addressing discards. By analyzing logbook records of individual hauls (n=127,415) across five-and-a-half-years (2012-2018) for all of Greenland’s fisheries, we show how onboard fishery observers affect reported discard weights. We find that fishery observers have a significant and widespread reporting effect on discards, resulting in higher average reported discard levels. A panel model also suggests how observers change fishers’ reporting behavior not just when they are on board, but in subsequent trips that follow. Our findings clarify how fishery observers help address waste, and why discards may appear to be rising, even when the proportion that they make up of the total catch is decreasing. Although discards remain an undesirable feature of commercial fishing, fishery observers have a significant observable effect on eradicating discarding behavior and in turn maximizing the benefits that humans derive from living marine resources.

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How Cybernetics Explains Institutional Failure: A Case of Greenland’s Open-Air Fish Markets

Marine Policy, 2020

Understanding why institutions fail is a major concern for natural resource governance. In systems where resources are managed locally, failure is often attributed to the rules poorly fitting the social-ecological system. But what might also bring failure is the manner with which the rules are ‘fitted’ to the system. This paper argues that the conceptual development of institutional failure could be made more tenable with cybernetics – the science of control and feedback. In our case study and process tracing of a ‘market’ institution (an open-air fish market in Greenland), we show how recently implemented European food safety regulations have generated unintended negative consequences, limiting Inuit access to marine foodstuffs, altering the social characteristics of food exchange, and giving rise to underground markets for marine foods. These outcomes first explain the failure of this market institution reform, but not necessarily why it failed. Using participant observation, focus groups and semi-structured interviews with various fishery stakeholders including civil servants and consumers, we show how cybernetic orders explain institutional failure. We focus on how command-and-control-style decisions to intervene in marine food trading and handling (considered as the first-order cybernetics) fostered public doubt for the scientific expertise underpinning the reforms, and ultimately led to a public rejection and closure of a new, hygienic, multi-million-dollar marketplace for marine foods. We clarify how second-order cybernetic elements — such as legitimacy, reflexivity, co-design, and interaction among governance actors — could have prevented the observed outcome. Our case expands the conceptual development of institutional failure and clarifies how the lens of cybernetics can inform the study and practice of institutional change in fisheries governance.
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