Learning from the unexpected: informing better policies from a past reform of fisheries subsidies

Fernando Aranceta-Garza and Andrés Cisneros-Montemayor

Chapter 9 in A Research Agenda for Sustainable Ocean Governance, 2025, pp 93-106 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Global fisheries subsidy reform is one of the most important concerted efforts to align modern ocean governance, yet national implementation is still in its very early stages. Mexico recently underwent such a large-scale reform, fully eliminating most capacity-enhancing subsidies and instead providing yearly cash transfers to fishers. This rapid change was mainly possible due to a confluence of social and political factors—namely urgent responses to the Covid-19 pandemic and broader government aims for centralization of decision-making and funding—so there were few bioeconomic rationalizations and no plans to monitor effects in this regard. Here, we discuss the early observed bioeconomic effects of this subsidy policy change, which suggest declining effort and increasing catch per vessel. We then highlight lessons to inform future research and monitor wider outcomes of subsidy reform, both here and elsewhere. When effects of policy change are not observable, researchers should ask whether this is due to a lack of reliable data, or to unconsidered mitigating factors that are offsetting expected effects, or because the original subsidy program was not having an effect in the first place. Any of these reasons can be true but would have potentially quite different implications for subsequent policies, and this must be determined through context-specific research. Key opportunities for future research include collecting data disaggregated by social groups and critically examining each step of a policy cycle (goals, options, decisions, implementation, evaluation), always grounding research on specific contexts for different social groups and sectors. Whether or not current subsidy policies remain in place, this is a relatively rare opportunity to contrast bioeconomic theory and insights from smaller-scale cases at larger scales to best inform future subsidy reform efforts in meeting sustainability and equity goals.

Keywords: Fishery Subsidies; Shrimp Sequential Fishery; Fishery Reform; Equity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035325740
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