“Viability”, an approach to sustainable development aiming to avoid crises over time: the case of fisheries

Nowadays, sustainable development is an explicit objective of all policies; it aims to reconcile economic, environmental and social issues, as part of a concern for intergenerational equity. The “viability” approach takes into account a set of sustainability stakes in a multicriteria dynamic framework. This approach is complementary to the classical ones based on the optimization of one sole criterion (for example, economic). It defines the configurations of sustainable exploitation of an ecological and economic system and explores the decisions to avoid or exit an over-exploitation crisis. We illustrate this approach with the results obtained in the case of fisheries management.