Management of mobile species with spatial property rights: Challenges and opportunities

Abstract

Territorial Use Rights for Fisheries (TURFs) offer a promising strategy to address overfishing problems faced by many small-scale fisheries. TURFs allocate property rights over fisheries resources to a group of fishers to incentivize optimal resource management. However, a challenge remains when using this strategy to manage mobile species and in locations with high human population densities. In such situations, a single TURF cannot be designed to encompass natural scales of movement while also being small enough to maintain favorable conditions for collective action. A bioeconomic model is used to investigate whether TURF networks have the potential to address this challenge. We explore cooperation incentives faced by TURFs within a network for various resource mobility rates, and investigate how offering a price premium for cooperating TURFs can improve system-wide outcomes. We find that without a market intervention, TURFs that are competing for the same resource have profit incentives to harvest above optimal levels for the entire system (i.e., non-cooperative behavior). We predict that incentives within TURFs will lead to non-cooperative behavior above a certain species mobility rate. However, offering a price premium for cooperating TURFs has the potential to provide the incentives needed to achieve full cooperation. The price premium required to achieve optimal economic outcomes depends on the mobility characteristics of the species being managed, but at maximum is 26% for highly mobile species. Finally, we explore how such market-based initiatives can be implemented and provide some insights on the local conditions that would best support this strategy.