Megan Bailey is co-lead of OceanCanada’s cross-cutting Access to Resources theme, and a SSHRC Canada Research Chair in Integrated Ocean and Coastal Governance at Dalhousie University’s Marine Affairs Program. She has an undergraduate zoology degree from Western University, and completed her Master’s and PhD at UBC’s Fisheries Centre (now the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries), focusing on fisheries economics relating to global tuna fisheries.
A week after defending her PhD in 2012, she joined the Environmental Policy Group at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, where she helped to lead the BESTTuna and IFITT programs. These programs focused on interdisciplinary studies in pursuit of equitable and sustainable transboundary tuna in the Western and Central Pacific, and on studying traceability implementation in Indonesia’s tuna supply chains, respectively. Her work is now positioned at the interface between private seafood governance (certifications, traceability) and public fisheries policy (national and international). Megan is particularly interested in how seafood companies and private certification programs are driving change in regional fisheries management.
Her work in the IFITT program is some of the first studying the socio-economic implications of seafood traceability and Fair Trade USA implementation. Megan has published over 30 scientific articles and book chapters, and has her first edited book coming out this month (Sustainable Food Futures: Multidisciplinary Solutions, edited by Jessica Duncan and Megan Bailey, Routledge, 2017). Megan currently serves on the Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee for the International Pole and Line Foundation, on the Board of Directors for the Ecology Action Centre, and on the Communications Committee for the Fishermen and Scientists Research Society.