Sustainable Fisheries Are Community-Led

Abstract

"The collapse of fisheries worldwide endangers the livelihoods and food security of tens of millions of people. These fisheries are often small and ill-suited to top-down regulatory intervention. In many cases, a 'tragedy of the commons' scenarioin which each individual fisherman seeks only to maximize his own catchleads to overfishing and collapse. But a recent article in Nature describes a different, far more promising trend. It analyzes the surprisingly successful preservation of small fisheries through devolved systems of comanagement."