Confirming the theories of 2009 Nobel Price winner Elinor Ostrom, a global study finds that community-based co-management between local fishermen and authorities is the most efficient management of the common resource.
The study, headed by Nicolas Gutierrez of the University of Washington and published in Nature, found that the traditional top-down approach with central authorities setting quotas was often hampered by poor implementation, and often direct abuse.
The best way to manage fisheries, the study that had looked at 130 fisheries in 44 developed and developing countries showed, was to bring together local representatives and fishermen who co-determine how the resources should be managed and enforce these decisions in an efficient way.
Economists in particular have often talked about the “tragedy of the commons” – implying that common resources are always poorly managed and should be either regulated by central authorities or privatised; a paradigm that was disputed by the 2009 Nobel Price (Economy) winner Ostrom, who showed that resource users frequently develop sophisticated mechanisms for decision-making and rule enforcement to handle conflicts of interest.
“Elinor Ostrom was right,” Omar Defeo, a University of Uruguay professor, scientific coordinator of Uruguay’s national fishery management program and co-author on the paper, told the Physorg.com news website.
“With community-based co-management, fishers are capable of self organizing, maintaining their resources and achieving sustainable fisheries.”
After reading the paper in advance of publication, Ostrom called the work “fabulous” and said, that it was ”very exciting to see the findings about community cohesion founded on norms, trust, communication, commitment and respect for leaders being the most important attributes leading to successful fisheries co-management”.
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Caption:
Researchers scored 130 community-based co-managed fisheries on eight outcomes ranging from community empowerment to increases in fish abundance around the world, with Europe and Southeast Asia broken out in the lower panels. Forty percent of fisheries scored positively on 6, 7 or all 8 outcomes, represented with dark- and light-green circles. Another 25 percent scored positively on 4 to 5 outcomes, represented in yellow; 18 percent scored 2 to 3, in orange; and 17 percent scored zero to 1, in red. Credit: Nicolas Gutiérrez/U of Washington.