Fishing for Principles: The Fairness of Fishing Quota Allocations

Allocating fish quota is a hotly disputed issue across the world, and many different criteria have been employed to achieve it. However, little attention has been devoted to examining the fairness of those criteria. This study aims to fill this gap by focusing on the eight most prominent criteria that have been used or proposed—prior use; market forces; historical entitlement; geographical proximity; sovereign right; economic dependence; environmental stewardship; and equal shares—and examining their respective ethical credentials as principles of distributive justice. The assumption lying behind this aim is that if agreement can be reached on which criteria are the fairest, future conflicts over quota allocations might be averted. The method used to conduct this research was normative analysis, and the materials analysed were obtained from databases such as the Web of Science. However, the study found that the ethically strongest criteria are environmental stewardship and economic dependence, but the most prevalent criteria are historical entitlement and geographical proximity (zonal attachment). So, the principles of distributive justice that are most likely to be applied are not the fairest principles but the principles with the greatest political support. For some commentators, this signifies that justice and ethics have been sacrificed to power and politics. However, there is some evidence that the tide is turning and the arguments in favour of fairness, perhaps in hybrid forms, are beginning to gain momentum.