Browsing by Author "Eagle, Josh"

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Ocean Zoning and Spatial Access Privileges: Rewriting the Tragedy of the Regulated Ocean
(2008) Eagle, Josh; Sanchirico, James N.; Thompson, Barton H.
"For the past thirty years, the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (the Act) has served as the primary legislative mechanism for conserving fish populations in United States marine waters. At the time Congress passed the Act, many of those populations were in jeopardy, the result of decades of virtually unregulated industrial-scale fishing. Throughout the first twenty years of its implementation, the Act was highly ineffective in rebuilding stocks and in preventing other stocks from becoming overfished. During this period, implementation of the Act by the eight Regional Fishery Management Councils focused more on maintaining fishing opportunities for fishermen than it did on maintaining healthy fish populations."
Public Fisheries
(2010) Eagle, Josh; Kuker, Amanda
"There is almost universal agreement that the most effective solution to open-access natural resource problems lies in some form of ownership. Authors disagree on the secondary question of which ownership form, i.e., private, community, or government, will produce the most efficient or equitable results under particular conditions. There has been little attention paid to the fact that government ownership, that is, regulation, is certain to produce results that all interested subsets of the public will view as inefficient and inequitable. Dissatisfaction flows inevitably from the requirements and realities of democratic decision-making structures and constraints. In other words, a democracy puts more emphasis on fair process and the incorporation of competing values than on achieving any particular objective. Thus, although government ownership might solve open-access natural resource problems such as those that occur in fisheries insofar as it creates a peaceable forum for dispute resolution, it does not lead to what anyone might consider well-managed fisheries. For government ownership and well-managed fisheries to coexist, the most logical solution is to create a subset of government structures, the goals of which are aligned with the preferences of various interest groups such as commercial fishers, recreational fishers, and marine conservationists. This approach, which is used on U.S. public lands, ensures that, within at least some parts of the public domain, groups will view management as having succeeded. Greater interest-group satisfaction should lead to welfare gains because those groups will, for example, feel less need to expend resources participating in costly agency processes."
Regional Ocean Governance: The Perils of Multiple-Use Management and the Promise of Agency Diversity
(2006) Eagle, Josh
"Two high-level committees--the United States Commission on Ocean Policy (U.S. Commission) and the Pew Oceans Commission (Pew Commission)--have recently issued reports expressing grave concerns about the condition of America's oceans. These committees identified the large number of 'overfished' American fisheries as an important problem. When a fishery is overfished and the size of the fish population is reduced to a suboptimal level, the result is economic harm to both fishermen and consumers. Excessive fishing also results in harder-to-price damage to marine ecosystems. Both the U.S. and Pew Commissions note the declining health of the ocean environment, as measured in terms of stability, productivity, and diversity. Recent studies show that the number of endangered species is increasing, with long-term damage to ocean habitats, dramatic shifts in the structure of marine food webs, and a decrease in the capacity of fish populations to recover from historic overfishing. While the economic costs of these impacts are more difficult to measure than the direct costs of overfishing, there is reason to believe they are significant."