Alaska's Commercial Fisheries Research Articles

For generations to come? The privatization paradigm and shifting social baselines in Kodiak, Alaska's commercial fisheries

This paper presents results from a study that explored a key threat to fisheries sustainability in Alaska – the graying of the commercial fishing fleet. In the Kodiak Archipelago region this research utilized a political ecology framework and mixed methods ethnography, including 70 semi-structured interviews and participant observation, to further understand this problem. Study results suggest that opportunities for young rural fishermen are increasingly constrained by interrelated socioeconomic and cultural barriers, which have created systemic equity and sustainability concerns. Furthermore, research indicates that the privatization paradigm of fisheries access is a major catalyst of change that has created and amplified barriers, transformed opportunity, and generated lasting inequities and social conflict. Foucault's concept of governmentality is used to describe how some fishermen are internalizing and normalizing privatization discourses to advance further regulatory change. Pauly's concept of shifting baseline syndrome is evoked to argue that current structures of degraded access and equity in the human fishery system are mistakenly assumed to be a natural state, rather than a result of a specific history of public policy choices. Due to the suite of challenges facing fishing people and communities, it is increasingly important to acknowledge the privatization of access as a key threat to sustainable coastal fishing futures.

The legal, regulatory, and institutional evolution of fishing cooperatives in Alaska and the West Coast of the United States

Between 1997 and 2011, fishing cooperatives on the West Coast of the U.S. and Alaska grew to cover almost 60% of U.S. West Coast and Alaska commercial fisheries. In those fisheries, cooperatives now manage capacity reduction and harvest limit compliance internally, transforming the way harvest limits are met—but not how they are set. Economic and regulatory incentives, both positive and negative, explain variations in cooperative structures and functions, particularly the level of participation, number of cooperatives within a fishery, and a shift in emphasis over time from internal quota setting and trading to managing non-target prohibited species avoidance. Ecological limits, which have generally been effective at sustaining fisheries on the Pacific coast, are still exogenous to cooperative management. Cooperatives commonly share information to avoid bycatch, but only coordinate harvests of target species to a very limited degree. Whether cooperatives evolve from effectively meeting external targets to either participating in the setting of limits (co-management) or moving beyond quota management into revenue sharing and coordinated fishing will depend on whether legal institutions and political objectives also evolve to allow new contractual and institutional arrangements.

Alternative Perspectives on the Sustainability of Alaska's Commercial Fisheries

Many believe commercial fisheries in Alaska (U.S.A.) are sustainability success stories, but ongoing socioeconomic problems across the state raise questions about how this sustainability is being defined and evaluated. Problems such as food insecurity and the disenfranchisement of Alaska Natives from fishing rights are well documented, yet these concerns are obscured by marketing campaigns that convey images of flourishing fishing communities and initiatives to certify Alaska's fisheries as responsibly managed. Fisheries management mandates and approaches built on such metrics and technologies as maximum sustainable yield and systems of tradable quotas actually serve to constrain, circumscribe, and marginalize some Alaskans' opportunities for effecting change in how the benefits of these fisheries are allocated. Beneath the narrative of sustainability, these management technologies perpetuate a cognitive ecological model of sustainability that is oriented to single-species outcomes, that casts people as parasites, and thus assumes the necessity of trade-offs between biological and social goals. Alternative cognitive models are available that draw metaphors from different ecological concepts such as keystone species and mutualisms. Such models, when used to inform management approaches, may improve societal outcomes in Alaska and elsewhere by promoting food security and sustainability through diversified natural resource harvest strategies that are more flexible and responsive to environmental variability and change.

Fishing by permit: Restricted common property in practice

Abstract Much has been written about the theoretical advantages of limited entry as a response to the problems of unrestricted common property in the commercial fisheries. Yet, full‐fledged limited‐entry systems have only rarely been worked out and implemented in practice. A notable exception to this is the limited‐entry regime adopted by the State of Alaska in 1973 and set forth in Alaska Statute 16.43.010 et seq. This essay offers a systematic evaluation of experience under the Alaska regime, covering the occurrence of unintended consequences and the pursuit of unstated objectives as well as the fulfillment of stated objectives. Overall, though limited entry has had a substantial impact on commercial fishing in Alaska, the regime has encountered serious problems and the future prospects of the limited entry program are not auspicious. Nonetheless, the alternatives to some form of limited entry for Alaska's commercial fisheries are not particularly attractive.