Privatization in Fisheries: Lessons From Experiences in the U.S., Canada, and Norway

Abstract

"In our research on fisheries management in Canada, Norway, and the United States, and in particular into systems of governance and market-oriented systems of resource allocation, we deal with the politics of conservation in several ways. The first concerns the politics of deciding for or against major institutional change. In all three countries, attempts to create so-called ITQs, or individual transferable quotas, in major commercial fisheries have been fraught with delay and controversy, largely because of the distributional issues raised by privatization and recourse to market-based regulation. The second concerns the structure of decision making, and in particular how user groups and their interests and concerns are and are not brought into the decision-making process. The third concerns the distributional effects of changes in fisheries property rights and how people respond to them. In this paper we touch upon aspects of these topics with particular emphasis on the hypothetical intersection of privatization and co-management."