IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/wdevel/v102y2018icp57-70.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Local Institutional Responses to Global Market Pressures: The Sea Cucumber Trade in Yucatán, Mexico

Author

Listed:
  • Bennett, Abigail
  • Basurto, Xavier

Abstract

The expansion of global seafood trade creates opportunities as well as risks for small-scale fisheries (SSFs) livelihoods. Markets provide economic opportunity, but without effective governance, high demand can drive resource degradation. In the context of small-scale sea cucumber fisheries in Yucatán, Mexico, this study documents local governance responses to new markets and identifies factors driving those responses. We conducted a comparative case study of two SSF communities, collecting participant observation and interview data during 16months of fieldwork. Our study found that local rules-in-use did not match government regulations and that the emergence of local rules was shaped by relations of production in each study site. Specifically, patron–client relationships promoted an open access regime that expanded local fishing fleets while fishing cooperatives attempted to restrict access to local fishing grounds through collective action and multi-level linkages with government. We propose that the different material incentives arising from the way that patron–client relationships and cooperatives organize labor, capital, and profits help explain these divergent governance responses. We hypothesize that this finding is generalizable beyond the study context, especially given that patron–client relationships and cooperatives are common throughout the world’s SSFs. This finding builds on previous research that indicates local institutions can mediate the effects of market pressures, showing that the emergence of local rules depends on how resource users are organized not just in relation to resource governance but vis-à-vis the markets themselves. Therefore, effective policies for SSFs facing market pressures require a greater emphasis on regulating local-level trade and governing the commercial aspects of fishing livelihoods. These lessons are relevant to the estimated 540 million individuals whose livelihoods SSFs support who may increasingly engage in the global seafood trade.

Suggested Citation

  • Bennett, Abigail & Basurto, Xavier, 2018. "Local Institutional Responses to Global Market Pressures: The Sea Cucumber Trade in Yucatán, Mexico," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 102(C), pages 57-70.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:102:y:2018:i:c:p:57-70
    DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2017.09.006
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X15307166
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.worlddev.2017.09.006?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Agrawal, Arun, 2001. "Common Property Institutions and Sustainable Governance of Resources," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 29(10), pages 1649-1672, October.
    2. Asche, Frank & Bellemare, Marc F. & Roheim, Cathy & Smith, Martin D. & Tveteras, Sigbjørn, 2015. "Fair Enough? Food Security and the International Trade of Seafood," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 67(C), pages 151-160.
    3. McCay, Bonnie J. & Micheli, Fiorenza & Ponce-Díaz, Germán & Murray, Grant & Shester, Geoff & Ramirez-Sanchez, Saudiel & Weisman, Wendy, 2014. "Cooperatives, concessions, and co-management on the Pacific coast of Mexico," Marine Policy, Elsevier, vol. 44(C), pages 49-59.
    4. Anna M. Birkenbach & David J. Kaczan & Martin D. Smith, 2017. "Catch shares slow the race to fish," Nature, Nature, vol. 544(7649), pages 223-226, April.
    5. Béné, Christophe & Lawton, Rebecca & Allison, Edward H., 2010. ""Trade Matters in the Fight Against Poverty": Narratives, Perceptions, and (Lack of) Evidence in the Case of Fish Trade in Africa," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 38(7), pages 933-954, July.
    6. Emilie Lindkvist & Xavier Basurto & Maja Schlüter, 2017. "Micro-level explanations for emergent patterns of self-governance arrangements in small-scale fisheries—A modeling approach," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 12(4), pages 1-23, April.
    7. Ovando, Daniel A. & Deacon, Robert T. & Lester, Sarah E. & Costello, Christopher & Van Leuvan, Tonya & McIlwain, Karlynn & Kent Strauss, C. & Arbuckle, Michael & Fujita, Rod & Gelcich, Stefan & Uchida, 2013. "Conservation incentives and collective choices in cooperative fisheries," Marine Policy, Elsevier, vol. 37(C), pages 132-140.
    8. Robert T. Deacon & Dominic P. Parker & Christopher Costello, 2013. "Reforming Fisheries: Lessons from a Self-Selected Cooperative," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 56(1), pages 83-125.
    9. Asche, Frank & Smith, Martin D., 2010. "Trade and fisheries: Key issues for the World Trade Organization," WTO Staff Working Papers ERSD-2010-03, World Trade Organization (WTO), Economic Research and Statistics Division.
    10. Deacon, Robert T & Parker, Dominic P. & Costello, Christopher J, 2008. "Improving Efficiency by Assigning Harvest Rights to Fishery Cooperatives: Evidence From the Chignik Salmon Co-op," University of California at Santa Barbara, Economics Working Paper Series qt1cv9s0v9, Department of Economics, UC Santa Barbara.
    11. H. Scott Gordon, 1954. "The Economic Theory of a Common-Property Resource: The Fishery," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Chennat Gopalakrishnan (ed.), Classic Papers in Natural Resource Economics, chapter 9, pages 178-203, Palgrave Macmillan.
    12. Nicolás L. Gutiérrez & Ray Hilborn & Omar Defeo, 2011. "Leadership, social capital and incentives promote successful fisheries," Nature, Nature, vol. 470(7334), pages 386-389, February.
    13. James E. Wilen & José Cancino & Hirotsugu Uchida, 2012. "The Economics of Territorial Use Rights Fisheries, or TURFs," Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 6(2), pages 237-257, July.
    14. H. Scott Gordon, 1954. "The Economic Theory of a Common-Property Resource: The Fishery," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 62(2), pages 124-124.
    15. Robert T. Deacon, 2012. "Fishery Management by Harvester Cooperatives," Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 6(2), pages 258-277, July.
    16. Richard Cudney-Bueno & Xavier Basurto, 2009. "Lack of Cross-Scale Linkages Reduces Robustness of Community-Based Fisheries Management," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 4(7), pages 1-8, July.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Bronnmann, Julia & Smith, Martin D. & Abbott, James & Hay, Clinton J. & Næsje, Tor F., 2020. "Integration of a local fish market in Namibia with the global seafood trade: Implications for fish traders and sustainability," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 135(C).
    2. Siegelman, Ben & Haenn, Nora & Basurto, Xavier, 2019. "“Lies build trust”: Social capital, masculinity, and community-based resource management in a Mexican fishery," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 123(C), pages 1-1.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Liu, Jing & Qin, Tianbao, 2018. "A Comparative Analysis of Fishing Rights From a Transaction Cost Perspective," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 153(C), pages 89-99.
    2. Felipe J. Quezada & Nathan W. Chan, 2024. "External Monitoring and Enforcement and the Success of Collective Property Rights Regimes," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 87(3), pages 605-628, March.
    3. Lawson-Remer, Terra, 2013. "Do Stronger Collective Property Rights Improve Household Welfare? Evidence from a Field Study in Fiji," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 43(C), pages 207-225.
    4. Elsler, Laura G. & Drohan, Sarah E. & Schlüter, Maja & Watson, James R. & Levin, Simon A., 2019. "Local, Global, Multi-Level: Market Structure and Multi-Species Fishery Dynamics," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 156(C), pages 185-195.
    5. Sabau, Gabriela & Boksh, F.I.M. Muktadir, 2017. "Fish Trade Liberalization Under 21st Century Trade Agreements: The CETA and Newfoundland and Labrador Fish and Seafood Industry," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 141(C), pages 222-233.
    6. Davis, Katrina & Pannell, David J. & Kragt, Marit & Gelcich, Stefan & Schilizzi, Steven, 2014. "Accounting for enforcement is essential to improve the spatial allocation of marine restricted-use zoning systems," Working Papers 195718, University of Western Australia, School of Agricultural and Resource Economics.
    7. Natale, Fabrizio & Borrello, Alessandra & Motova, Arina, 2015. "Analysis of the determinants of international seafood trade using a gravity model," Marine Policy, Elsevier, vol. 60(C), pages 98-106.
    8. Aburto-Oropeza,Octavio & Leslie,Heather M. & Mack-Crane,Austen & Nagavarapu,Sriniketh Suryasesha & Reddy,Sheila M.W. & Sievanen,Leila, 2016. "Property rights for fishing cooperatives : how (and how well) do they work ?," Policy Research Working Paper Series 7662, The World Bank.
    9. Sirak Robele Gari & Alice Newton & John D. Icely & Maria Mar Delgado-Serrano, 2017. "An Analysis of the Global Applicability of Ostrom’s Design Principles to Diagnose the Functionality of Common-Pool Resource Institutions," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 9(7), pages 1-17, July.
    10. Manning, Dale T. & Uchida, Hirotsugu, 2014. "Are Two Rents Better than None? When Monopoly Harvester Co-ops are Preferred to a Rent Dissipated Resource Sector," 2014 Annual Meeting, July 27-29, 2014, Minneapolis, Minnesota 171628, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
    11. McCay, Bonnie J. & Micheli, Fiorenza & Ponce-Díaz, Germán & Murray, Grant & Shester, Geoff & Ramirez-Sanchez, Saudiel & Weisman, Wendy, 2014. "Cooperatives, concessions, and co-management on the Pacific coast of Mexico," Marine Policy, Elsevier, vol. 44(C), pages 49-59.
    12. Sarker, Ashutosh & Ikeda, Toru & Abe, Takaki & Inoue, Ken, 2015. "Design principles for managing coastal fisheries commons in present-day Japan," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 117(C), pages 32-38.
    13. Rao, Akhil & Burgess, Matthew & Kaffine, Daniel, 2020. "Orbital-use fees could more than quadruple the value of the space industry," MPRA Paper 112708, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    14. Shamshak, Gina Louise & King, Jonathan R., 2015. "From cannery to culinary luxury: The evolution of the global geoduck market," Marine Policy, Elsevier, vol. 55(C), pages 81-89.
    15. Reimer, Matthew N. & Abbott, Joshua K. & Haynie, Alan C., 2022. "Structural behavioral models for rights-based fisheries," Resource and Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 68(C).
    16. Tumur, Erdenechuluun & Heijman, Wim J.M. & Heerink, Nico & Agipar, Bakey, 2020. "Critical factors enabling sustainable rangeland management in Mongolia," China Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 60(C).
    17. Tim Cashion & Santiago de la Puente & Dyhia Belhabib & Daniel Pauly & Dirk Zeller & U Rashid Sumaila, 2018. "Establishing company level fishing revenue and profit losses from fisheries: A bottom-up approach," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 13(11), pages 1-20, November.
    18. Robinson, Brian E. & Provencher, Bill & Lewis, David J., 2013. "Managing Wild Resources: Institutional Choice and the Recovery of Resource Rent in Southwest China," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 48(C), pages 120-132.
    19. Valderrama, Diego & Anderson, James L., 2010. "Market interactions between aquaculture and common-property fisheries: Recent evidence from the Bristol Bay sockeye salmon fishery in Alaska," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 59(2), pages 115-128, March.
    20. Blanco, Esther & Haller, Tobias & Lopez, Maria Claudia & Walker, James M., 2016. "The tension between private benefits and degradation externalities from appropriation in the commons," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 125(C), pages 136-147.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:102:y:2018:i:c:p:57-70. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/worlddev .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.