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Stakeholder engagement (SkE) in research is currently experiencing significant growth within the fields of environmental and sustainability sciences. Stakeholder engagement ensures the relevance of research questions to societal expectations and the uptake and salience of the co‐produced knowledge and results for their use in the decision‐making process. In a context of societal challenges regarding biodiversity conservation and the sustainability of marine and freshwater social‐ecological systems (SESs), participatory approaches constitute key methods in applied research involving actions and decision‐making. There are, however, many gaps in the practical, conceptual and ethical ways stakeholders have been involved in research. We propose here a systematic map of the literature on SkE in research on marine and aquatic SESs carried out on French European and overseas territories, in order to draw up the first comprehensive overview of how SkE has developed and changed since 1945. This systematic map will identify a representative list of scientific articles on SkE in French marine and freshwater social‐ecological research. The literature search will include both academic literature (e.g. peer‐reviewed articles, reviews, meta‐analyses) and grey literature (e.g. reports, working papers) using the most relevant search engines for the scientific literature published between 1945 and 2023. Retrieved publications will be reviewed for relevance according to a predefined set of eligibility/ineligibility criteria by a group of trained reviewers. The eligibility check will be done in two successive screening steps: (1) title and abstract and (2) full text, each independently performed by two reviewers. All retained literature will be subjected to coding and metadata extraction using the Sysrev platform. No validity assessment will be undertaken. A database of the metadata extracted will be provided, along with a narrative description of the evidence base, and a set of figures

Marine ecosystems evolve under many interconnected and area-specific pressures. To fulfil society's intensifying and diversifying needs while ensuring ecologically sustainable development, more effective marine spatial planning and broader-scope management of marine resources is necessary. Integrated ecological–economic fisheries models (IEEFMs) of marine systems are needed to evaluate impacts and sustainability of potential management actions and understand, and anticipate ecological, economic and social dynamics at a range of scales from local to national and regional. To make these models most effective, it is important to determine how model characteristics and methods of communicating results influence the model implementation, the nature of the advice that can be provided and the impact on decisions taken by managers. This article presents a global review and comparative evaluation of 35 IEEFMs applied to marine fisheries and marine ecosystem resources to identify the characteristics that determine their usefulness, effectiveness and implementation. The focus is on fully integrated models that allow for feedbacks between ecological and human processes although not all the models reviewed achieve that. Modellers must invest more time to make models user friendly and to participate in management fora where models and model results can be explained and discussed. Such involvement is beneficial to all parties, leading to improvement of mo-dels and more effective implementation of advice, but demands substantial resources which must be built into the governance process. It takes time to develop effective processes for using IEEFMs requiring a long-term commitment to integrating multidisciplinary modelling advice into management decision-making.

Reconciling food security, economic development and biodiversity conservation is a key challenge, especially in the face of the demographic transition characterizing many countries in the world. Fisheries and marine ecosystems constitute a difficult application of this bio-economic challenge. Many experts and scientists advocate an ecosystem approach to manage marine socio-ecosystems for their sustainability and resilience. However, the ways by which to operationalize ecosystem-based fisheries management (EBFM) remain poorly specified. We propose a specific methodological framework-viability modelling-to do so. We show how viability modelling can be applied using four contrasted case-studies: two small-scale fisheries in South America and Pacific and two larger-scale fisheries in Europe and Australia. The four fisheries are analysed using the same modelling framework, structured around a set of common methods, indicators and scenarios. The calibrated models are dynamic, multispecies and multifleet and account for various sources of uncertainty. A multicriteria evaluation is used to assess the scenarios' outcomes over a long time horizon with different constraints based on ecological, social and economic reference points. Results show to what extent the bio-economic and ecosystem risks associated with the adoption of status quo strategies are relatively high and challenge the implementation of EBFM. In contrast, strategies called ecoviability or co-viability strategies, that aim at satisfying the viability constraints, reduce significantly these ecological and economic risks and promote EBFM. The gains associated with those ecoviability strategies, however, decrease with the intensity of regulations imposed on these fisheries.