Lipstick and catch shares in the Western Pacific: Beyond evangelism in fisheries policy?

Seth Macinko

Marine Policy, 2014, vol. 44, issue C, 37-41

Abstract: The push for catch shares is on in the United States, nationwide generally, and in the western Pacific specifically. The prevailing understanding of catch shares emphasizes individual private property rights and changes in fisher behavior are understood to result from changes in rights in accordance with a long-established canon in fisheries economics. It is argued that this orthodoxy misses the causal factor in catch shares and thus constricts the range of policy options for catch shares. Moreover, this standard understanding of catch shares fosters opposition. Opposition to catch shares in the western Pacific can be understood as a specific variant of a generic pattern of opposition that is often centered on concerns for distributional impacts. Blind to the fact that their own misunderstanding fuels opposition, proponents of privatization resort to explaining opposition in terms of a simple, but inaccurate, for-or-against-catch-shares dichotomy. Perpetuation of this dichotomy has become a tool in the promotion of one particular ideological conception of catch shares and is a disservice to the public policy process. A possible path forward in the context of the western Pacific is presented that is based on diminishing the role of outside policy experts while encouraging local design of programs to meet local goals. Such an approach is consistent with the nature of development as local people adopt and adapt outside influences on their own terms.

Keywords: Catch shares; Rights based fishing; ITQs; Fishing communities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308597X13001589
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:marpol:v:44:y:2014:i:c:p:37-41

DOI: 10.1016/j.marpol.2013.08.004

Access Statistics for this article

Marine Policy is currently edited by Eddie Brown

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