Group items tagged

FORMS OF PROPERTY IN RIGHTS-BASED FISHERIES MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS Management measures may be classed as input and output controls.Input controls regulate fishing effort. Output controls directly controlcatch amounts. Input controls such as licensing may create limited prop-erty rights, although more sophisticated output control mechanismshave been adopted by a number of countries. These include territorialuse rights in fisheries (TURFS), stock use rights in fisheries (SURFS), andcommunity development quotas (CDQs). Increasingly common are quota based systems, such as the individual quota (IQ), the individual fishingquota (IFQ), individual vessel quotas (IVQ), the individual transferableshare quota (ITSQ), and the individual transferable quota (ITQ). Each of these approaches shall be considered in turn. DOMESTIC IMPLEMENTATION OF PROPERTY RIGHTS-BASED MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS A number of States have implemented, in varying degrees, rights-basedfishing entitlements. These include Australia, Canada, Iceland, NewZealand, and the United States. The domestic implementation and sta-tus of these measures is considered for each country in turn. AN APPRAISAL OF RIGHTS-BASED MEASURES In light of domestic experiences of property rights-based instruments it isappropriate to remark upon the success of quota systems to date. Quotas systems have attracted critical comment in three broad areas: economic success, conservation and management effectiveness, and allocationalconcerns. At this point it is worth emphasising that because legal reason-ing is consequence sensitive, these factors have a role to play in the law-making process. These are considered in turn, before some final remarksare made on how the legal construction of property rights more generally has influenced the development and operation of rights-based fishing measures.

"Scholars of common property resource theory (CPR) have long asserted that certain kinds of institutional arrangements based on collective action result in successful environmental stewardship, but feedback and the direct link between social and ecological systems remains poorly understood. This paper investigates how common property institutional arrangements contribute to sustainable mangrove fisheries in coastal Ecuador, focusing on the fishery for the mangrove cockle (Anadara tuberculosa and A. similis), a bivalve mollusk harvested from the roots of mangrove trees and of particular social, economic, and cultural importance for the communities that depend on it. Specifically, this study examines the emergence of new civil society institutions within the historical context of extensive mangrove deforestation for the expansion of shrimp farming, policy changes in the late 1990s that recognized "ancestral" rights of local communities to mangrove resources, and how custodias, community-managed mangrove concessions, affect the cockle fishery. Findings from interviews with shell collectors and analysis of catch-per-unit-effort (CPUE) indicate that mangrove concessions as common property regimes promote community empowerment, local autonomy over resources, mangrove conservation and recovery, higher cockle catch shares, and larger shell sizes, but the benefits are not evenly distributed. Associations without custodias and independent cockle collectors feel further marginalized by the loss of gathering grounds, potentially deflecting problems of overexploitation to "open-access" areas, in which mangrove fisheries are weakly managed by the State. Using Ostrom's Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework, the explicit link between social and ecological systems is studied at different levels, examining the relationship between collective action and the environment through quantitative approaches at the fishery level and qualitative analysis at the level