Advances in Property Rights Based Fisheries Management: An Introduction

Abstract

The papers published in this special issue of Marine Resource Economics were initially presented at the Workshop on Advances in Property Rights Based Fisheries Management held in Reykjavik, Iceland, August 27-29, 2006. This workshop was organized by RSE, an Icelandic think tank, with financial support from the Ministry of Fisheries in Iceland, the Federation of Icelandic Fishing Vessel Owners, and Iceland’s commercial banks Glitnir and Landsbanki Islands. On behalf of the RSE, I use this opportunity to thank these sponsors for their generous support. I also thank my co-editor, Professor Rognvaldur Hannesson, for his help with the peer review process. Finally, thanks are due to The MRE Foundation, as represented by the editor, Professor James Anderson, and the technical editor, Barbara Harrison, for its support of this project. Hopefully, it will not be seen as too much of a simplification to claim that economic science has generated three fundamental perspectives on the fisheries problem. One is the externality perspective. Another is the fisheries game perspective, and the third is the property rights perspective. These perspectives are by no means mutually exclusive. On the contrary, they complement each other. This does not mean that they are equivalent, however. One of them may be more illuminating or, more importantly, of greater help in improving fisheries than the others. The fundamental motivation for the workshop that generated the papers in this issue was that, at least when it comes to the practice of fisheries management, the property rights perspective is the most useful. It is widely agreed that the modern theory of fisheries economics was launched by Scott Gordon’s 1954 article in the Journal of Political Economy (Gordon 1954). Of course, this wasn’t the first analysis of the problem—scientific progress rarely evolves in that way. In the years preceding Gordon’s paper, an informal group of economists including A.D. Scott, J. Crutchfield, R. Turvey, and Gordon himself had been discussing the problems of fisheries along lines similar to the ones that Gordon made famous (Scott 1989, 1996, 2007). Besides, the Danish economist, Jens Warming, in a couple of articles in 1911 and 1931, forwarded essentially the same analysis (Warming 1911, 1931; Andersen 1983). There is little doubt that other precursors can be found by historians of economic thought. In his seminal contribution to the topic, Anthony Scott attempted to bring the role of property rights to the forefront (Scott 1955a). Unfortunately, Scott’s analysis was restricted to the case of a sole-owner fishery. While, on this basis, he essentially proved that property rights were central to the fisheries problem, this crucial point seems to have escaped most other researchers. Thus, my initial reading of Scott’s article, under expert guidance some 20 years later, indicated that the number of participating fishers was crucial for the fisheries problem, not property rights as