Rights and Justice in Sea-Tenure: The Northern Abundance Trap

Abstract

"Development of rights in aquatic environments is a complex but scientifically challenging matter. In its many forms it addresses the core of the question of how inequalities are generated and maintained through private use of public resources. Global experience with overexploitation of recourses with a free and equal access has urged the worlds scientists and administrators to try to craft institutional arrangements that can safeguard a sustainable use of common property - maybe even public property - resources. Can this be done without reinventing the old concept of privilege - either as private privilege or as a group privilege?

"Even in a nicely working 'commons' institution some people are kept outside the common pool resource. Does therefore limited access and a transfer to privileged appropriators of responsibility for maintenance of a limited resource inevitably lead to inequalities? Or does the current search among a wider range of economic systems, among these also feudalism, offer new possibilities? (Daly & Cobb 1989).

"In aquatic environments there are two basic categories of institutional arrangements for rights and duties in relation to resources: 1) Government designed regulatory systems for just, equal or efficient appropriation of wild and moving species - systems that usually has led to exhaustion of the resource; and 2)More organic sea tenure systems developed by resource users themselves - probably most suitable for stable marine species, for enhancement and cultivation.

"In the real world, technological and institutional development, together with increased ecological knowledge tend to bring these two categories continuously closer together. The fundamental hypothesis in this paper is that in such a process of convergence, sea tenure systems will over time dominate over and be more stable than regulatory systems, in spite of their tendency to produce inequalities."