Nearly 30 years ago, I was invited to Moncton, New Brunswick, to make a presentation on watershed-scale management of the Great Lakes to a group of Canadian officials and fishermen. The ground fishery, mostly cod, had been shut down, and a lot of people were out of work. I was running Michigan’s Office of the Great Lakes at the time.
Arriving at the meeting, I came upon a very unhappy group of people. They were gracious to me personally, but there was an air of mutual suspicion and even blame in the room. The government regulators felt that their technical advice had been disregarded for years, and the fishermen, resentful, blamed the regulators for their lost livelihood. Some fishermen even wanted reimbursement for the government’s decision.
This was my first, very real encounter with the “tragedy of the commons,” the subject of so many books and articles in the field of environmental and natural resources policy. It was not pleasant. And until recently, this tragedy has plagued too many of the world’s marine fisheries, seemingly in terminal decline, from over-harvesting.
Typically, classroom discussions would postulate one of two answers to the problem of the commons—total regulation or total privatization—to disincentivize unsustainable use and exploitation of common-pool goods and resources or to incentivize sustainable use out of sheer self-interest.
This binary choice has given way to a new approach, one that incorporates rights- or market-based incentives with a more collaborative, even communal system that is enabled, but not dominated, by governmental regulation. Within the fisheries industry, this new way of thinking led to the “catch share” system, a hybrid creation bestowing a kind of property right—be it in terms of volume by species or the area to be fished—to individuals, communities, and associations. It is not a spontaneous emergence of a market, but rather one that has been successfully implemented through a blend of regulation and collaboration.
This policy innovation stems both from the “free market environmentalism” movement as well as from the research of Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize of economics. Her work demonstrated that there are many successful forms of communal or localized supervision of natural resources such as fisheries, grazing lands, and forests. Despite being non-governmental, these frameworks are enforceable within the particular community tied to the resource.
But as T. S. Eliot wrote, “Between the idea/And the reality . . . Falls the Shadow.” Catch shares qua market are not established without intentionality, effort, and personal persuasion with and among the fishing community itself. This is the story, well told, in Sea Change: Unlikely Allies and a Success Story of Oceanic Proportions by James Workman and Amanda Leland.
Workman and Leland define catch shares as a “social contract,” one “in which the government sets science-based limits on overall harvest, then clearly defines for the fishermen and fishing communities a secure portion of various living fish populations-either in the form of percentile catch quotas or a share of traditional spatial fishing grounds-in exchange for adhering to strict accountability.” These rights can be “purchased, leased or handed down to newcomers or family members which gives holders enduring value.” This changes everything.
The authors focus on the Gulf of Mexico, the red snapper, and a colorful personality, Buddy Guindon of Galveston, Texas, a former Marine and a hyper-competitive fishermen, initially skeptical of catch shares but soon a powerful advocate.
In the bad old days, government regulators would simply set a limit, fire a “starting gun,” and start the “derby” in which all the boats head out and fish to the last permissible fish, thereby travelling farther out and burning more fuel, encountering harsh weather, and at the end, earning rock-bottom market prices for the fish caught. Think Oklahoma Land Rush without secure property rights.
Other rules also had unintended consequences. “Minimum size limits motivated fishermen to toss fish under thirteen or fourteen inches overboard,” note Workman and Leland. “Conversely, trip limits compelled them to ‘high grade’ or keep only the largest and most valuable for sale as meat . . . .”
Partly out of necessity (or perhaps a sense of nothing left to lose), and partly due to the perseverance of committed economists, scientists, and environmentalists at the Environmental Defense Fund, skeptics like Buddy came around, giving catch-shares a try and finding that the incentives finally worked. Fishermen were now incentivized to protect the fisheries, innovate their practices, and profit from higher prices at the marketplace.
Success soon followed. After implementation of catch shares in 2007, the fishing fleet for red snapper came in under the regulators’ total allowable catch “that year, and every year thereafter.” And when catch shares were introduced in northern California in 2011, discarding of ground fish had dropped 80% and various rockfish and other species “had been declared rebuilt.”
The hard part was the broad-based negotiations for each fishing operation’s quota, which necessitated taking a reduced number of fish to protect the resource and establish a base line. However, with time, “the fishermen . . . managed to fill their boats on shorter trips, saving time, labor and other operating costs while keeping fish fresh.”
With the new system came technological innovations that improved accountability and performance, whether through the development of nets and gear that do not snag rare species or the placement of cameras on board ship that make the market more honest and efficient. Such practices also ensure consumer buy-in. Sea Change contains an eye-opening chapter on these improvements, illustrating how such breakthroughs can create political, economic, and ethical trust among market actors and the public at large.
Besides improving verification, enforcement, and accountability, these new technologies spurred by the catch share program “let private companies prove and improve, compliance, thus (ironically) shrinking the size of government,” maintain Workman and Leland. And as demonstrated in the Gulf, “profits rose when fishermen could verify who caught which fish, how and when and where.”
Workman and Leland also note the spread of catch shares throughout the globe, an “Oceanic Transformation,” which bodes well for the world’s stressed and depleted fisheries.
The authors take on the major criticisms of catch shares, acknowledging that, ideologically, they fall into a “no-man’s-land.” They are no longer a “free public good,” but neither are they “a pure form of private property.” It could be characterized as a usufruct right found in civil law jurisdictions and originating from ancient Roman law, usus et fructus (“use and enjoyment”). Concerns persist on both the left and right of the political spectrum.
“If some on the left disliked catch share because they saw them as privatizing public wealth, some conservatives thought the access privileges they grant to the resource don’t go nearly far enough,” opine the authors. Catch shares are not an inviolate property right like title to land. In other words, they could be rescinded by political diktat.
Sea Change is a story an environmental and natural resources success that anyone interested in the fate of the natural world should study carefully.
G. Tracy Mehan, III, is an adjunct professor at Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University, and executive director for government affairs at the American Water Works Association. He may be contacted at [email protected].
Questions or comments? Email us at [email protected]. The views and opinions expressed in the Environmental Forum are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of ELI.