Chapter 8

The performance of different fisheries management systems in relation to Infinity fish

“Co-​management, command and control, or fishing community management of fisheries for sustainability – it depends on the discount rate of each of these entities”.

Command and control approaches to fisheries management, as well as community based management systems, have been proposed in different arenas as effective means to manage a fishery resource (Gordon, 1954) (Scott, 1955) (Jentoft, 1989) (Clark, 1990) (Ostrom et al., 1989) (Arnason, 2002). Under assumptions such as perfect exchange of information and perfect enforcement, we could expect that, regardless of who is in charge of the definition of the optimal harvest policy (either the government or the community of fishers), there should be an overall agreement on what is expected to be the optimal exploitation of the fishery. But even under these restrictive assumptions, this does not necessarily have to be true, unless both decision makers share the same intertemporal preferences with regards to the valuation of the expected flows of benefits from the resource through time.

In this chapter, we investigate the performance of different management systems when the discount factor of the regulator is different from the discount factor of fishers. The alternative management systems to be considered here are i) command and control or hierarchical systems, ii) self-​governance or community based management, and iii) co-​management structures. Self-​governance and command and control systems are situated at the ends of an imaginary continuum of participatory management systems, in which co-​management proposals are placed at some point between these. As we will see, the question of whose intertemporal preferences must be incorporated into the decision-​making process must become a relevant management decision itself. Throughout this chapter, this particular issue will be analysed taking into account the impact of this decision on the sustainability and economic performance of both the resource and the fishing sector.

To enrich the discussion, we make an additional assumption that the discount factor of the fishers can be either exogenous or endogenous to their involvement in the decision-​making process. We begin section 2 by analysing the foundations of discounting methodologies. In section 3, we will characterise the alternative management systems to be considered. In section 4, we will compare the performance of the management systems, assuming that the discount factors of both government and fishers are different and will not be affected by the nature of the management regime in place. In section 5, we will abandon the exogenous discount factors assumption, and allow the discount factor of the fishers to be affected by the extent of their involvement in the definition and implementation of the actual management regime. In section 6, we will refer briefly to the implications of relaxing the basic assumptions about perfect information and enforcement. Finally, in section 7, we conclude.

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