Question

4. Members of a fishing village in New England have open access to a fishery (no one in the village explicitly owns the fishery). As long as an individual is a resident of the village, the individual can harvest as much fish as he wants from the fishery. All non‐residents are not allowed to fish.  Given this scenario, is the equilibrium level of fishery harvest “too much” or “too little” or equal to the social optimum? Explain why this occurs.  Support your answer by drawing the private and social, marginal cost and marginal benefit curves for fish. Identify the deadweight loss area if any exists.

Answer 1

On 19 July 2010, President Obama signed a National Ocean Policy executive order endorsing findings of the Administration’s Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force, including “ecosystem-based” and “adaptive” marine resource management (Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force 2009). Meanwhile, the National Marine Fisheries Service of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was finalizing a national policy encouraging the use of fishery catch shares. Catch shares include limited access privileges, individual fishing quotas (ITQs), and quotas held by groups such as harvest cooperatives or fleet sectors (NOAA 2009). Both policies were informed by years of environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) lobbying of NOAA and the White House Council on Environmental Quality, by Congressional mandates embedded in the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (FCMA)—particularly its amendments in 1996 and 2006—and by reports from bodies such as the National Academy of Sciences, U.S. Oceans Commission, and Pew Oceans Commission (National Research Council 1999, 2006, Pew Oceans Commission 2003, U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy 2004, Joint Oceans Commission Initiative 2009). Despite this breadth of input, public discussion appears not to consider the possibility that ecosystem-based management and catch shares are at odds: historically intertwined, but conceptually divergent.

Although policy conflict is nothing new, this particular divergence provides entrée to more empirically robust conversations about the future of marine resource management. Evidence from the nation’s oldest commercial fishery, the New England groundfishery (which includes bottom-dwelling species, such as cod (Gadus morhua), haddock (Melanogrammus aeglefinus), winter flounder (Pleuronectes americanus), dabs (Hippoglossoides platessoides), grey sole (Glyptocephalus cynoglossus), pollock (Pollachius virens), whiting (Merluccius bilinearis), red hake (Urophycis chuss), and redfish (Sebastes fasciatus)) and, especially, case material from the state of Maine suggest that catch shares may deter the development of ecosystem-based management. Catch shares shift the attention of managers, fishermen, and the public away from integrated understandings of fished ecosystems and fishing practices, and toward paper fish. The term “paper fish” was coined by fishermen to refer to federal permits allowing fishing activities based on single-species stock assessments, implying that the assessments are detached from the complexities of real-world fishing practice and fished ecosystems. (The few fisherwomen in New England self-identify as “fishermen,” so that term is used here.)

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration now boasts 14 catch share programs in the United States. Although some fishermen have implemented catch shares with relative enthusiasm, others are deeply concerned about long-term social–ecological damage. Public comments collected by NOAA in 2010 and summarized in Appendix 1 revealed a strong opposition to catch shares among both commercial and recreational fishermen, reaching 83% and 90% respectively. Maine’s fishing communities have long been among the most resistant to catch shares. Opposition grows principally from socioeconomic considerations, specifically the concern that catch shares consolidate fishery access and decision making in the hands of fewer, larger, and less locally committed firms, but it also reflects concerns about ecosystem impacts. Similar objections are raised by fishermen in other locales, but often with less unanimity.

Pursuant to this argument, this paper briefly summarizes scholarship on ecosystem- and catch share-based fisheries policy in the U.S. context, presents the groundfish case study and discusses its implications, and concludes with a glance toward possible futures.

Despite the legal requirement that managers examine and mitigate potential effects of policies on fishing communities (Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 2006), these types of data are conspicuously absent from most management discussions. While some social scientists in fisheries management acknowledge and lament these shortcomings (e.g., Sepez et al. 2006), little headway has been made toward including detailed, site-specific, socio-cultural data on fishing communities in the decision-making process. On the rare occasions when managers do include non-economic social data in assessments, these data tend to come from broad, large-scale datasets (e.g., US Census), garnered from available online sources, or based on surveys or interviews administered during brief visits to fishing communities. The data collected are often limited and typically focus directly on involvement in fisheries (e.g., Himes-Cornell et al. 2013). The complex relationships between fishing peoples and their resource bases, however, are difficult to capture in such broad scale data or numerical summaries (Sepez et al. 2006).

When managers exclude socio-cultural data the ramifications can be serious. Exclusion of these data can paint simplified pictures of communities, with unintended consequences, such as perpetuating inequality, reducing resilience, and disturbing networks of informal institutions important for resource sustainability (Poe et al. 2014). This is especially true for indigenous communities, for whom historical conditions are particularly important to understand or meaningfully assess contemporary conditions. Thus, we posit that relational place-making can provide a useful lens through which to understand the social and cultural dimensions of fisheries dependent communities for inclusion in management decision-making. Such a framework allows for integration and comparison of socio-cultural values with the economic indicators and programs currently used in management, providing a useful point of entry into management discussions. Below, we provide an example of the framework’s utility, examining the successes and failures of a particular policy, the community development quota (CDQ) program, in the Pribilof Island communities of St. George and St. Paul, Alaska.

Many fishing communities are struggling today. Through policies of access privatization and declines in resources, residents are losing access to their resource bases. Despite this, and in the face of economic collapse, people are choosing to stay in these communities. These socially created places are therefore important. They represent shared history, a sense of community and family, as well as a way-of-life quite different than those found in urban spaces. In indigenous communities, place furthermore represents a connection to sovereignty, cultural heritage, and sense of stewardship toward land and resources. Only by understanding all these factors, and the importance with which residents view them, can policy-makers fulfill their obligations to achieve community sustainability and minimize adverse impacts on communities (e.g., Gehan and Hallowell 2012; Executive Order 12898 of February 11 1994).

Fishery policies for indigenous and rural fishing communities cannot, therefore, be successful if the authors of these plans do not understand local goals and needs. While gaining this understanding is a difficult task, it is a worthwhile one. As Campbell and Hunt (2012) explain, conflicts between indigenous and government goals do not reflect different priorities—both groups desire to see increased income and opportunities for struggling communities; rather the disagreement centers around who sets the development agenda and how success is defined. Thus policy makers should be clear in stating goals and how these goals articulate with local understandings and desires.

As a tool to aid in this endeavor, we propose the use of relational place-making as an analytical framework to provide complex social science data to inform and help structure discussions around community-based fisheries policy. While economic markers are commonly used as indicators for measuring the success of policies, and development programs in particular, they have many limitations. Economic markers cannot predict, describe, or explain conflicts between insider and outsider ideas about development and goals for the future. They cannot adequately demonstrate whether local well-being has actually increased or decreased as the result of an intervention. And, finally, they cannot capture the loss of non-market, locally valued, place characteristics. Relational place-making, in contrast, can do all of these things.