Opportunities and precautions for integrating cooperation and individual transferable quotas with territorial use rights in fisheries

Abstract

Territorial use rights in fisheries (TURFs), which allocate spatial fishing rights to fishers, are increasingly implemented in an effort to incentivize sustainable fishing practices. In some contexts, TURFs may be preferred over other rights-based approaches, such as individual transferable quotas (ITQs). However, TURFs may not always achieve fishery goals, for example, when competition exists within or among TURFs. Under these circumstances, there may be value in combining TURFs with cooperatives and/or ITQs to achieve benefits that may not be possible using only one management instrument alone. We use a bioeconomic model to explore potential outcomes of combining TURFs with cooperatives and ITQs, and identify conditions under which combining these approaches can help achieve fishery goals. Our results indicate that ITQs among TURFs can result in optimal levels of profit, even in conditions involving source-sink movement dynamics and heterogeneous fishing skill. We also show that institutions that facilitate cooperation within TURFs can provide near-optimal levels of profits, though this ability depends on cooperation being present in all TURFs within the system. Decreasing costs through ITQs or cooperatives can provide an incentive to catch more fish and drive down biomass, though the TURF structure itself prevents overfishing in our modeled system.