System vs. Species Management: An Alternative Fisheries Management Approach

Abstract

"Fisheries management recognizes the need for property rights, and seeks to create a sole owner, which will either bear all of the costs or enjoy all of the benefits of the future condition of the resource. The sole owner can take the form of a collective body such as the government, a corporation, a co-op, or a community. However, for social, political, and biological reasons, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to create a sole owner in the real world.

"For the sole owner to function, appropriate feedback must occur to enable the decision-maker(s) to act appropriately. That is, the rights holder(s) must make decisions with some understanding of the impact that a particular action is likely to have, even if it is only a qualitative understanding. There is likely to be more feedback at the system level rather than at the species level, where variability is greater. When the rights holder can make decisions that will have even qualitatively predictive results, appropriate incentives can develop. Rights, therefore, need to be defined to a geographic scale that encompasses all relevant biological dimensions of the system.

"This paper presents a different approach for creating property rights and appropriate incentives necessary to manage fishery resources. The idea is to allocate rights to users to fish in specific management areas, which should encompass all appropriate components of the ecosystem. This approach finds that emphasis of management should be on maintaining the health of the ecosystem, rather than simply independently maintaining the health of each individual species. That is, it emphasizes an ecosystem approach to management (what users call 'the Big Box') rather than the traditional, single-species approach (what users refer to as 'the Small Box'). A STELLA model with two ecosystems and multiple species is used to explore the incentive systems that arise with these two different approaches to management. The model operates in the context of the fisheries found in the Gulf of Maine."