Transforming the Fisheries by Patrick Bresnihan

Author:Patrick Bresnihan [Bresnihan, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8032-8584-2
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 2016-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Rather than seek “optimal solutions,” the managers of institutional commons are looking instead to foster spaces in which communities can take on more responsibility for their own environments and livelihoods while remaining flexible and adaptive. This is the value of collective action: creating “room to develop and tie together promising novelties, thus producing a double capacity to deliver, or as local discourse has it, ’to do it better’ than can be done through the unmediated imposition of regulatory schemes” (Van der Ploeg 2008, 202). It is no coincidence that community‐managed approaches to resource management have emerged at a time when many national governments are reducing their financial or institutional capacities to respond to proliferating and complex environmental problems. In the context of development policies in the Global South, for example, Forsyth and Johnson write, “For donors and NGOS, [Elinor] Ostrom’s design principles offered a model of decentralization and local resource governance that could be replicated in multiple field settings, and which used empowering local and incentive‐based governance mechanisms” (Forsyth and Johnson 2014, 1098).10

The flipside to this investment in community management, of course, is that the failure of inshore fishermen to act rationally is deemed a failure that demands more work and coordination to overcome. Carney captured this mentality when he told me of the chronic problem of “uneconomic” conduct within the inshore sector:

They are not aware of profitability—well, they are aware, but they don’t act as if they do. You could know at any given Monday morning when you start work, they should know what the likelihood of making a profit in the week is—they know the market price, the catch rate from last week, they know their costs. That’s a simple kind of profit equation— they can work that out in their head, but when you ask them, “Do they ever work it out in their head?” they never do. (Carney 2009; emphasis added)

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