Abstract
Understanding how fishers make decisions is important for improving management of fisheries. There is debate about the extent to which small-scale fishers follow an ideal free distribution (IFD) – distributing their fishing effort efficiently according to resource availability rather than being influenced by social factors or personal preference. Using detailed data from 1800 fisher catches and from semi-structured interviews with over 700 fishers at Lake Alaotra, the largest inland fishery in Madagascar, we show that fishers generally conform to IFD. However, there were differences in catch: effort relationships between fishers using different gear types as well as other revealing deviations from the predictions of IFD. Fishers report routine as the primary determinant of their choice of fishing location, explaining why they do not quickly respond to changes in catch at a site. Understanding the influences on fishers’ spatial behaviour will allow better estimates of costs of fishing policies on resource users, and help predict their likely responses. This can inform management strategies to minimise the negative impacts of interventions, increasing local support for and compliance with rules.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10745-016-9805-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
Inland fisheries are widely recognised as significant sources of food and income for rural communities but most are fully exploited or overfished (FAO 2010; Welcomme 2011)
We examined the attributes of particular sites that deviated from ideal free distribution (IFD) to determine drivers of fisher behaviour
The prospect of better catches and/or lower costs per se has less effect because of the constraining influences of routine and familiarity. These patterns show that Anororo-based fishers conform generally to IFD and make rational spatial decisions, they are risk averse and submaximal catches suffice under conditions of uncertainty
Summary
Inland fisheries are widely recognised as significant sources of food and income for rural communities but most are fully exploited or overfished (FAO 2010; Welcomme 2011). Rational choices and utility maximisation are primary tenets of traditional economic theory (Morse 1997; Güth 2008), and models based on these tenets have frequently been applied within fisheries research to explain fisher decision-making and behaviour (Holland 2008; Daw et al 2011). Such models assume that fishers have complete knowledge of fishery characteristics and use this information to make fishing decisions to maximise their personal utility, with profit often used as a proxy for utility (see Daw et al 2011). Fishers were informed that participation was voluntary and that their identities and responses would not be shared with anyone
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