ITQs from a Community Perspective: The Case of the Canadian Scotia-Fundy Groundfish Fishery

Abstract

"There continues to be considerable interest in using rights-based management to prevent overfishing and overcapitalization. With implementation of a number of these types of regimes, the aim of current research has been to evaluate these regimes for their effectiveness and far their impact on communities.

"Community issues duster around social equity, the distribution of resource rights. How resources are distributed affects individuals' material and social well-being political power. Distributive patterns also affect the fate of local, treasured institutions. From a fishing community's viewpoint, concentration of resource use-rights is the most salient and threatening consequence of instituting an ITQ system. Norwegians successfully resisted transferability and the Canadians chose to phase in this component largely because transferability makes concentration possible.

"A social benefit of successful fishery management is sustainability. However, it is not clear that ITQ systems promote conservation. ITQs may increase individuals' incentives to cheat the system by highgrading, dumping, and illegal landings and harvesting small fish because they bring immediate profits."