Catch share

Abstract: Recent reports suggest that most of the world's commercial fisheries could collapse within decades. Although poor fisheries governance is often implicated, evaluation of solutions remains rare. Bioeconomic theory and case studies suggest that rights-based catch shares can provide individual incentives for sustainable harvest that is less prone to collapse. To test whether catch-share fishery reforms achieve these hypothetical benefits, we have compiled a global database of fisheries institutions and catch statistics in 11,135 fisheries from 1950 to 2003. Implementation of catch shares halts, and even reverses, the global trend toward widespread collapse. Institutional change has the potential for greatly altering the future of global fisheries.

Abstract: The public perception of fisheries is that they are in crisis and have been for some time. Numerous scientific and popular articles have pointed to the failures of fisheries management that have caused this crisis. These are widely accepted to be overcapacity in fishing fleets, a failure to take the ecosystem effects of fishing into account, and a failure to enforce unpalatable but necessary reductions in fishing effort on fishing fleets and communities. However, the claims of some analysts that there is an inevitable decline in the status of fisheries is, we believe, incorrect. There have been successes in fisheries management, and we argue that the tools for appropriate management exist. Unfortunately, they have not been implemented widely. Our analysis suggests that management authorities need to develop legally enforceable and tested harvest strategies, coupled with appropriate rights-based incentives to the fishing community, for the future of fisheries to be better than their past.

Abstract: Economists were sensitized to the common property problems of the fishery by H. Scott Gordon’s seminal article that appeared in 1954. The advice from economists on fisheries management tended to focus on various forms of limited entry licensing. The degree of success achieved overall with limited entry schemes has been sufficiently modest for economists to cast about for an alternative approach to fisheries rationalization. The chapter offers a few generalizations regarding the practical applicability of the individual quota. It aims to identify the circumstances under which use of the individual quota should be avoided or approached with particular caution. The purported advantages of management by individual quota allocation lie in the elimination of important external diseconomies, both among those associated with open-access fisheries and those peculiar to fisheries subject to limited entry licensing. For many fisheries, enforcement is likely to be one of the most difficult problems with an individual quota system.