Marching Towards Leviathan, Embracing the Market, or Romancing the Commons: An Examination of Three Approaches to Fisheries Management

Abstract

"The paper argues that three competing paradigms or approaches to fisheries management exist: (1) the traditional centralized bureaucratic model favoring government regulation; (2) a market-based model favoring individual transferable quotas (ITQs); and, (3) a community-based model advocating the self-regulation of fish stocks. Examining each institutional arrangement reveals the normative biases and preferences that lead to different policy objectives. It also demonstrates that the policy analysts subscribing to each approach tend to rely on a different set of policy instruments and institutional arrangements. After examining each paradigmatic approach to fisheries management, the paper then critiques the institutional analysis performed by policy analysts in the fisheries literature. The major critiques are that the literature often ignores the full range of transaction costs associated with developing and implementing fisheries policies. The paper then compares each approach in greater detail by examining the transaction costs associated with each institutional arrangement. The paper concludes with an examination of how each institutional arrangement satisfies some general criteria for assessing institutional performance. The central argument is that fisheries analysts need an improved understanding of the strengths and limitations of the three prevailing approaches to fisheries management. Moreover, a greater cross-fertilization of ideas and approaches is needed to bridge the gap between the three disjointed areas the fisheries literature."