Design principles for managing coastal fisheries commons in present-day Japan

Ashutosh Sarker (), Toru Ikeda, Takaki Abe and Ken Inoue

Ecological Economics, 2015, vol. 117, issue C, 32-38

Abstract: Ostrom (1990) challenged the traditional belief that commons management inevitably requires state ownership or privatization and instead established the notion of user self-governance. This notion, a third policy option for managing the commons, entails little or no state involvement. Under this notion, Ostrom developed eight design principles to which self-governing institutional arrangements adhere, while the role of the state is minimal. This article seeks to establish whether design principles characterize such institutional arrangements when the role of the state is accommodated explicitly within the principles. Drawing on a case study of present-day management of Japan's community-based coastal fisheries commons, our study shows that the design principles can better characterize self-governing institutional arrangements when the state adopts a pro-user self-governance role that provides strategic support for users, but neither takes ownership of the commons nor participates in engineering the institutional arrangements.

Keywords: Fisheries commons; Design principles; User self-governance; Japan (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800915002669
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:117:y:2015:i:c:p:32-38

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2015.06.019

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().