Abstract
Canada has undertaken commitments to recognize the rights of Indigenous Peoples in fisheries through policies and agreements, including Integrated Fishery Management Plans, the Reconciliation Strategy, and Land Claim Agreements (LCAs). In addition to recognizing rights, these commitments were intended to respect geographic adjacency principles, to enhance the economic viability of Indigenous communities, and to be reflective of community dependence on marine resources. We examined the determinants of quota allocations in commercial fisheries involving Nunatsiavut, Northern Labrador, the first self-governing region for the Inuit peoples in Canada. It has been argued that current fishery allocations for Nunatsiavut Inuit have not satisfied federal commitments to recognize Indigenous rights. Indicators that measure equity in commercial allocations for the turbot or Greenland halibut (Reinhardtius hippoglossoides) and northern shrimp (Pandalus borealis)fisheries were identified and assessed. In these two cases, historical allocations continue to predominate for allocations based upon equity or other social or economic considerations. We illustrate equity-enhancing changes in the quota distribution under scenarios of different levels of inequality aversion, and we make qualitative assessments of the effects of these allocations to Nunatsiavut for socioeconomic welfare. This approach could benefit fisheries governance in Northern Labrador, where federal commitments to equity objectives continue to be endorsed but have not yet been integrated fully into quota allocations.
Highlights
The social, cultural, ecological, and economic importance of marine ecosystems in the Arctic remain to a large extent understudied, despite their importance to the wellbeing of Inuit communities
We review the current status of the socioeconomic benefits that commercial fisheries produce as a result of turbot and shrimp allocations to the Nunatsiavut Government (NG) along with management and governance issues associated with access to commercial fisheries
We recognize the complexity of decision-making for allocations, we propose the use of economic tools that can help increase transparency, which we expect may contribute toward alleviating conflicts on resource access caused by top-down decision-making processes
Summary
The social, cultural, ecological, and economic importance of marine ecosystems in the Arctic remain to a large extent understudied, despite their importance to the wellbeing of Inuit communities. In addition to this limitation of using the stakeholder groups to reflect distributional equity, another caveat of this approach is that it does not account for heterogeneity among these groups and their capacity to access the resource This becomes important, especially for the turbot fishery for which allocations are shared among different fleet sectors (Supplementary Tables 1, 2). Foley et al (2019) suggest that these licenses should be seen in the context of Inuit political mobilization in response to colonial and post-colonial resource extraction activities in the region They note that when the licenses were granted to Nunatsiavut fishing interests, there was significant effort into ensuring that the Northern Labrador communities would be the ones to benefit from those and relevant measures and mechanisms were suggested to serve this purpose.
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