Optimising harvest strategies over multiple objectives and stakeholder preferences

•We present a quantitative, non-commensurable-unit approach to operationalising harvest strategies over multiple objectives and stakeholder preferences, via a multi-indicator value function with explicit objective preference weights.•Our method enables stakeholders to consider a richer range of tradeoffs than is possible with bio-economic models.•Our method allows the formal evaluation of performance across alternative stakeholder group preferences, providing an impartial way to obtain an overall optimum total allowable catch (TAC).•While the model is conceptually not complex, parameterising and optimising the model was fraught with technical challenges, foremost that the model is information hungry, and produced a likelihood function that was complex and resulted in a sensitive (in an estimation sense) model.•The inclusion of fewer operational objectives and performance indicators may be more appropriate, but to do so would require reconsideration of how to translate broader objectives into quantitative performance indicators.•While our approach provides a pathway, it is one that forces managers and stakeholders to confront the associated data requirements. Natural resource management has long recognised that the multi-objective nature of management is important, but has struggled to operationalise this into quantitative, measurable objectives for functional use in management. Operationalising broader ecological and social objectives has been particularly problematic. In fisheries management, the focus has mainly been on target species sustainability and, in the past few decades, on profitability. However, multi-objective management is now essential as fisheries have become recognised as complex social-ecological-systems. Policy and legislation demand a move towards quantitative approaches for reconciling multiple objectives and operationalising these within harvest strategies. We present a quantitative, non-commensurable-unit approach, via a multi-indicator value function with explicit objective preference weights. We use a simulation to set Total Allowable Catches (TACs) for three main species groups in a reef line fishery in Australia's Great Barrier Reef. Our method enables stakeholders to consider a richer range of tradeoffs than is possible with bio-economic models. Moreover, it allows the formal evaluation of performance across alternative stakeholder group preferences, providing an impartial way to obtain an overall optimum TAC. The simulation req