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Bargaining, Uncertainty, and Property Rights in Fisheries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Frank Alcock
Frank Alcock
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science at Duke University
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Extract

Garrett Hardin's “tragedy of the commons” metaphor is commonly invoked to account for the unfortunate state of world fisheries. But the world s oceans are no longer a global commons and have not been so for the past two decades. Open-access regimes have persisted within many exclusive economic zones (EEZs) during this time, but coastal states' authority to regulate domestic fisheries has existed for more than a generation. Faced with the prospect of Hardin's tragedy, coastal states have had more than twenty years to devise institutional constraints that would prevent it. This article asserts that the dismal experience with EEZs is in large part attributable to distributive bargaining problems that arose within coastal states in the wake of EEZ extension. Moreover, the article argues that high levels of uncertainty that characterize the early stages of institutional development have exacerbated these problems. Finally, the article demonstrates how the variety of institutional designs and paths of institutional development that are observed in the cases of Iceland, Norway, and Atlantic Canada result from the different configurations of political power and political structure within each case. While the empirical discussion is focused upon property rights and fisheries, the theoretical discussion of bargaining and uncertainty has widespread application across comparative and international politics.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 54 , Issue 4 , July 2002 , pp. 437 - 461
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 2002

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References

1 Consensus on mutual recognition of two-hundred-mile EEZs was reached at the the Third Law of the Sea Convention (LOSC) in Caracus, Venezuela, in 1974. LOSC was ratified in Montego Bay, Jamaica, on September 24, 1982.

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23 An anonymous reviewer has observed that the arguments of Fearon and Koremenos are not strictly complementary; that is, Koremenos's emphasis on learning and flexibility may mollify the intractable bargaining stances Fearon associates with long shadows of the future.

24 Barzel also argues against the claim that more precision is always desirable, but his justification for imperfectly delineated rights rests on the costliness of rights specification. My justification rests on uncertainty about future roles and distributive outcomes that will result from rights specification. See Barzel, Yoram, Economic Analysis of Property Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

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28 Ibid.

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30 Ibid.

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35 Effort quotas usually involve restrictions on the number of days at sea.

36 Hannes H. Gissurarson “The Politics of Enclosures” (Paper presented at Fishrights 99 Conference, Fremantle, Western Australia, November 1999).

37 In addition to geographic restrictions on transferability, quotas could not be transferred independently of the vessels to which they were allocated. To acquire ITQ shares, ITQ vessels had to be purchased as well.

38 Recent legal challenges, however, have raised questions about the compatibility of fisheries privatization with the Icelandic constitution.

39 Apostle et al. (fn. 26).

40 Norway splits the overall TAC for this stock with Russia.

41 Holm, Ranes, and Hersoug (fn. 25).

42 Ibid. Partially exclusive rights refer to a situation where individual vessels are awarded a maximum quota of which only a portion is guaranteed. The nonguaranteed portion is subject to within-group competition.

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54 An anonymous reviewer has noted that the earlier theoretical discussion on political contracting draws from Rawls's (fn. 16) and Buchanan's writings (fn. 17) on “true constitutive and constitutional settings” in contrast to regime formation in small-scale and global arenas with existing political cleavages and foundations, as in the case with property rights in fisheries. The possibility is acknowledged that these different contexts may lead to different impacts of uncertainty on distributive versus integrative bargaining.