Abstract
The insights in Governing the Commons have provided foundational ideas for commons research in the past 23 years. However, the cases that Elinor Ostrom analyzed have been exposed to new social, economic, and ecological disturbances. What has happened to these cases since the 1980s? We reevaluated one of Ostrom's case studies, the lobster and groundfishery of Port Lameron, Southwest Nova Scotia (SWNS). Ostrom suggested that the self-governance of this fishery was fragile because the government did not recognize the rights of resource users to organize their own rules. In the Maine lobster fishery, however, the government formalized customary rules and decentralized power to fishing ports. We applied the concepts of feedback, governance mismatches, and the robustness of social-ecological systems to understand the pathway of institutional change in Port Lameron. We revisited the case of Port Lameron using marine harvesters' accounts collected from participant observation, informal interviews and surveys, and literature on fisheries policy and ecology in SWNS and Maine. We found that the government's failure to recognize the customary rights of harvesters to organize has weakened feedback between the operational level, where resource users interact with the resource, and the collective-choice level, where agents develop rules to influence the behavior of resource users. This has precipitated governance mismatches, which have led harvesters to believe that the decision-making process is detrimental to their livelihoods. Thus, harvesters rarely participate in decision making and resist regulatory change. In Maine, harvesters can influence decisions through participation, but there is a trade-off. With higher influence in decisions, captains have co-opted the decision-making process. Nevertheless, we suggest that the fisheries of SWNS are more vulnerable to social-ecological change because of weaker feedbacks than in Maine. Finally, we have discussed the potential benefits of polycentricity to both fisheries.
Highlights
The insights in Governing the Commons (Ostrom 1990) have provided foundational ideas for commons research for more than 20 years. Ostrom (1990) showed that resource users can act collectively to manage common pool resources (CPRs) and proposed 8 design principles that foster collective action and selfgovernance
We applied the concepts of feedback, governance mismatches, and the robustness of social-ecological systems to understand the pathway of institutional change in Port Lameron
In the Maine and Port Lameron fisheries, we examined the endogenous links at the collective-choice level between resource users and public infrastructure providers, between public infrastructure providers and rules and social capital, and between the resource users and rules and social capital
Summary
The insights in Governing the Commons (Ostrom 1990) have provided foundational ideas for commons research for more than 20 years. Ostrom (1990) showed that resource users can act collectively to manage common pool resources (CPRs) and proposed 8 design principles that foster collective action and selfgovernance. Ostrom (1990) showed that resource users can act collectively to manage common pool resources (CPRs) and proposed 8 design principles that foster collective action and selfgovernance These insights were based on an analysis of 86 case studies of fisheries, forests, and irrigation systems. Brewer (2012b) revisited Acheson’s (1988) The Lobster Gangs of Maine and demonstrated the utility of this type of analysis She applied ideas from political ecology and poststructuralism to Acheson’s work to show how the politics of scale, heterogeneity among resource users, and subjectivities that emerge from political decisions influence SESs. Based on Davis’s work, Ostrom (1990:177) characterized the Port Lameron fishery as institutionally fragile.
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