New Marine Commons Along the Chilean Coast: The Management Areas (MA) of Peñuelas and Chigualico

Abstract

"In order to halt resource degradation of the high value sea snail ‘loco’ (Concholepas concholepas), the Chilean state in the late 1990s institutionalised commons – Territorial Use Rights for Fisheries (TURFs), which since then have had varying results, especially in economic terms. Theories on the commons advocate that the economic returns of TURFs should 1) be higher than the costs and efforts of engaging in them and 2) that the economic benefits of the territory should be more attractive than those fishers would obtain from outside of the TURFs. If a TURF does not bring satisfactory economic returns then how does this relate to the social and ecological sustainability of the Chilean TURFs? And how are the economic returns of the TURFs connected to the global market’s unequal exchange? This paper deals with two TURF examples, the management areas (MAs) of Peñuelas and Chigualoco, both in the Coquimbo region. We aim at analyzing what determines the sustainability of these two management areas, one of which seems to be a ’success’ in economic terms. In order to study these cases, we mainly used a series of Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) tools to assess the fishers’ perspectives. These are combined with observations and discussions as well as open and semi-structured interviews – the latter also being applied to assess the perspectives of other actors. Our analysis shows a big difference between the two MAs: on the one hand, confirming that Peñuelas is successful both economically and also socially (with well-functioning organisation, generous internal solidarity etc.), while, on the other hand, Chigualoco is economically much worse off, which seems to interfere with the possibility of organisation in a mutually trusting way. Our results also show that there seems to be a relationship between the economic returns of an MA and its institutional and organisational aspects. Furthermore, low economic returns might also have impacts on the sustainability of the ecological system. However, neither the fishers in an economically well-functioning MA, such as Peñuelas, nor the fishers in the less economically beneficial Chigualoco, are in control of the driving forces of the global market. Irrespective of economic performance, both fisher organisations have been empowered and gained increased control of resources with the implementation of the TURFs, at the same time as they cannot influence either the larger ecological context nor the global market conditions. These factors too affect the possibilities for ecological sustainability."