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Abstract:
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"Property rights structure incentives for long-term sustainability. Here we investigated how areabased
policy tools that can adapt to climate change create trade-offs in terms of property rights.
There is tension between property rights theory (long-term secure rights associated with
sustainability) and resilient, adaptive tools where rights are temporary. Schlager and Ostrom have
useful a conceptual schema for thinking about property rights of commons (Schlager & Ostrom,
1992); we use this tool to analyze trade-offs. Fish Refuges are adaptive and temporary area-based
tools in Mexico that were established to solve fisheries decline. They are one of the few (but
growing number of) adaptive area-based conservation tools, and have restructured property rights.
We qualitatively analyzed how these Fish Refuges restructured property rights, thus creating
different trade-offs for different actors. Fish Refuges were made legally available from a new
fisheries law in 2007, and were first established in 2012. By 2017, there were 40 Fish Refuges in
Mexico accounting for 20,000 km2. Before the Fish Refuges, there were overlapping and unclear
legal harvest rights in the Corredor region. In practice (de facto rights), local communities
harvested fish with no limits, as did outsiders. Management and exclusion rights legally rested with
the state, but de facto were nonexistent. Thus there were few incentives for long-term management,
beyond local dependence upon the fishery. Fishing was going down, and local fishers in the region
blamed this on overharvest from poor management and lack of exclusion. Fish Refuges are created
when fishers submit a proposal (assisted by a non-governmental organization), which is assessed
and edited by the state fisheries research agency, then established by the state fisheries
enforcement agency. The process of these first Fish Refuges has led to fishers gaining de facto
management and exclusion rights by giving up harvest rights. Outsiders have lost harvest rights and
have been excluded from management. Adaptive area-based conservation tools create unstable and
temporary property rights, but here have allowed local resource users to give up shaky harvest
rights and gain shaky management and exclusion rights. They have led to new opportunities for
negotiating management and rights with the state, some of which may be formalized into legal
management and exclusion rights in the future."
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