Community fisheries management What structure and why?

Theory has shown and experience has verified that individual fishing rights such as territorial user rights (TURFs) and individual transferable quotas (ITQs) can be effective in overcoming the common property problem and generating economic efficiency in fisheries. Unfortunately, these property rights are not applicable to all fisheries. TURFs only work for species that are sufficiently sedentary to remain largely within individual TURFs. ITQs only work if the individual quota constraint can be sufficiently enforced and it turns out that in many fisheries the cost of this is simply prohibitively high. This applies not the least to the numerous artisanal fisheries around the world.

These limitations have drawn attention to the possibility of allocating not individual but collective rights to groups of harvesters. While noting that the type of rights conferred as well as the group receiving them may be quite varied, it is customary to refer to this arrangement as community fishing rights. Community fishing rights, of course, do not constitute a fisheries management regime. They merely endow the community with the formal powers and opportunity to implement an effective fisheries management regime. Obviously, there is no guarantee that this opportunity will be used.

This paper is concerned with identifying conditions under which community fishing rights are likely to enhance the economic efficiency of fishing. Such conditions can be seen as design principles that can assist fishing authorities around the world interested in setting up systems of community fishing rights.