Global Fisheries Management Challenges
The fisheries sector plays an important role in terms of food security, employment and income in many countries. Some 58.3 million people were engaged in the primary sector of capture fisheries and aquaculture in 2012. Since the mid-1980s, employment in that sector has grown faster than has the world’s population. In 2012 it represented 4.4% of the 1.3 billion people economically active in the broad agriculture sector worldwide (up from 2.7% in 1990). The world’s population increased by 75% from 1970 to 2005, while around the world, fishers increased by 178% (Kolding et al. 2014: 318). The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that, overall, fisheries and aquaculture provide the livelihoods of between 10% and 12% of the world’s population (FAO 2014a: 6).
The contribution of fisheries to the global food supply is also significant. The global demand for fish is expected to increase by 0.5% annually as a result of increases in population size and economic development (Delgado et al. 2003). The fisheries sector provides the main source of protein for 16.7% of the world population’s intake of animal protein and 6.5% of all protein consumed. Fish provide more than 2.9 billion people with almost 20% of their intake of animal protein, and 4.3 billion people with about 15% of such protein (FAO 2014: 4). According to the FAO, global capture fishery production reached 93.7 millionmetrictons in 2011 (FAO 2014: 5).
Global fisheries management has witnessed many fisheries crises. In a world with an ever-expanding population, the question is how can we balance what we take from the seas and with keeping the oceans healthy. The global increase in fishing efforts has resulted in the overexploitation of valued species and the decline of fish stocks. In many parts of the world, fisheries are showing signs of being fully exploited or overfished, with production levelling off or declining (Watson and Pauly 2001). More than 85% of the world’s fish stocks are now fished to full capacity, or are overfished (FAO 2012a). Global fisheries management faces the challenge of large increases in the demand for fish while fish stocks are declining. The global fisheries sector was shaken by the collapse of the Canadian northern cod fishery in 1992 (Hilborn et al. 2003: 360; Schrank and Roy 2013: 397). On 2 July 1992, Newfoundlanders were shocked to find that fishing of the northern cod stock, which had historically been one of the great fisheries in the world, had officially been banned by the federal minister of fisheries and oceans, Newfoundland’s John C. Crosbie. Local fishers witnessed the total collapse of the fishery, which had been sustainably harvested for 500 years. Overfishing was the main cause of the cod collapse (Hilborn et al. 2003: 360).
As a consequence of the collapse, about 20,000 people lost their jobs and the economy of Newfoundland was severely damaged. Canadian taxpayers paid more than CAD1 billion per year to support unemployed fishers. The anger and chaos caused by shocked fishers was described as follows:
Nobody who saw the Minister’s press conference will ever forget the vision of angry fishers trying to enter the room while the police hustled Crosbie down a back staircase. The fishers were angry at losing their livelihood while being offered a derisory replacement income. (Schrank and Roy 2013: 397)
It is obviously important to get fisheries governance right. Decision-makers and resource managers are searching for better ways of managing fisheries. Fisheries management experts increasingly recognize that problematic management approaches are one of the main causes of fisheries resource overexploitation. The most obvious and commonly advocated global policy response to the fisheries crisis is to reduce fishing effort by cutting the number of fishers and boats in operation. However, when such an approach is unilaterally adopted by the state, its implementation is often challenged with rejection by fishers, and even their violent actions. There is also a risk that an incomplete understanding of the causes of fisheries degradation may exacerbate the problem. In this critical context, thinking about how to create a win–win situation between the task of protecting fisheries resources and generating or maintaining a stable income for fishers who depend on fisheries resources is imperative. This requires contributions by both the state and fishing communities. They need to work together and share management responsibilities. However, how to do this properly and effectively is still a challenge for both self-governance scholars, such as Ostrom, and current co-management scholars.
Current Approaches to Fisheries Governance
Since the 1990s in fisheries management, the co-management concept has gained increasing acceptance among governments, development agencies, researchers and fishers as an appropriate arrangement of future fisheries management systems. Co-management is defined broadly as a governance arrangement whereby management responsibility is shared between the government and fishing communities (Pomeroy and Berkes 1997; Sen and Nielsen 1996; Nielsen et al. 2004; Pomeroy et al. 2010; Pomeroy and Rivera-Guieb 2006). Therefore co-management is the combination of state and associational actors co-managing a common pool of natural resources, such as fisheries. Co-management refers to a set of institutional and organizational arrangements (rights and rules) to define the cooperation among the state fisheries administration and relevant fishing communities and their fisheries associations. The essence of co-management is an institutional response as a result of a bargaining process among various groups with different powers to control the allocation of rights over resources and to gain representation for determining those rights (Nielsen et al. 2004: 156). One of the theoretical foundations of co-management comes from a set of ideas developed by Ostrom (1990) which challenge the “Tragedy of the Commons” (Hardin 1968) view of common pool resource (CPR) systems and support collective action in natural resource management as an economically viable alternative to privatization or top-down attempts at state regulation. According to theorists, co-management aims to increase the involvement of resource users and to empower them to make decisions in a more democratic and effective governance system. Also, the effectiveness of fisheries management is expected to increase under co-management arrangements because the acceptance of management measures is assumed to be more widespread when there is greater involvement by users in the decision-making process, and when users’ knowledge is included to enable the contents of management measures to be more appropriate and to better reflect local conditions (Pomeroy and Berkes 1997; Sen and Nielsen 1996; Nielsen et al. 2004; Pomeroy et al. 2010; Pomeroy and Rivera-Guieb 2006). However, the co-management approach and related research are still underdeveloped, especially in terms of engaging the state in supporting fishing communities in the management of fisheries resources over the long term in a sustainable manner. At the same time, the co-management literature on fisheries association-based management is also thin.
The main claim of this book is that although co-management has become a key means of fisheries management over recent decades globally, it has seldom been a success story in fully addressing collective action problems in fisheries management. Therefore the question raised here is why co-management still remains in many cases in a phase of trial and error. In answering, this book is designed to explore the theoretical foundations of co-management and provide critiques of the co-management approach. The underlying research supports the book’s argument by investigating three case studies in which fisheries associations have been empowered to take responsibility in managing fisheries resources. The book assesses interventions by the state in support of fisheries associations with a specific focus on resourcing issues. A key aim is to contribute to and develop the existing global dialogue on the challenges to fisheries management and how the state can act to ensure the successful management of fisheries resources in partnership with fisheries communities. Accordingly, the book will extend the existing “self-management” account by Ostrom (1990) to explain why a country such as Japan, with strong state capacities and experiencing intense government interventions, has been globally recognized as one of the most successful in implementing fisheries co-management, while in Norway collective action via fisheries association activity has been established for a long period but is revealed as fragile when governments change governance strategies. The study will also focus on Vietnam, which has adopted fisheries co-management initiatives only since the mid-1990s. There, co-management has been strongly promoted by the state but is still limited, largely because the state has weak capacity in terms of resourcing. “The state” in this research includes governments, and numerous agencies and public bodies of administrative, legal, bureaucratic and coercive systems, that structure relationships between civil society and public authorities. The focus of this book is particularly on mechanisms adopted by the state when working with fisheries associations to carry out management functions.
In searching for the development of cooperative behaviours among common-pool users, Ostrom (1990) conducted extensive empirical research in the 1980s that revealed situations in which resources were used sustainably by local user groups that could organize themselves to solve collective action problems, such as free-riding, commitment issues, the supply of new institutions and monitoring individual compliance with sets of agreed rules. She defines eight institutional conditions necessary for successful cooperative governance of the commons:
- clearly defined resource boundaries;
- congruence between rules and local conditions;
- affected people’s capacity to modify the rules;
- available and accountable monitoring;
- graduated sanctions ;
- conflict-resolution mechanisms ;
- no challenges from external government authorities regarding the rights of resource users;
- small CPRs that may nest in a larger system with a similar structure.
Ostrom’s approach sheds new light on specifying institutional conditions for local participation in managing CPRs. These principles help to meet requirements of governance of environmental resources, such as dealing with conflicts; inducing compliance with rules; encouraging adaptation and change; providing physical, technical and institutional infrastructure; and offering necessary information (Dietz et al. 2003: 1910). However, the eight institutional conditions are essentially a local or society-based approach and do not properly address the important role of the state in managing CPRs (Anthony and Campbell 2011: 287; Agrawal 2003: 250; Clement and Amezaga 2013: 145). Ostrom suggests that central regulation can prevent resource users from developing appropriate rules because individuals and groups often wait for the government to provide solutions to their problems. She assumes that “if someone else agrees to pay the costs of supplying new institutions then it is difficult to avoid the temptation to free-ride” (Ostrom 1990: 213). In contrast, Anthony and Campbell (2011: 288) argue that the state cannot be so easily ignored theoretically from the process of formulation of cooperative behaviours. According to Agrawal (2003: 254), “it is possible in principle, and perhaps more defensible, to thi...