Fishery Management by Harvester Cooperatives

Managing fisheries by delegating authority to an association of users, often organized as a cooperative, is gaining increased attention as a strategy for implementing rights-based reform. Assigning rights to groups rather than individuals can facilitate coordination and collective action and enable efficiency gains similar to those achieved when a firm organizes inputs centrally. Evidence from developed country fisheries managed by cooperatives indicates that coordination gains can be substantial. Furthermore, these gains often take forms overlooked in the traditional fishery reform literature, including those from enhanced product recovery and quality, improved spatial and temporal deployment of effort, and reduced environmental damage. In developing countries, assigning management responsibility to user groups can facilitate user-based provision of public goods in situations where governments do not function well. Developing country fishery cooperatives commonly provide monitoring and enforcement of access limitations, limits on fishing effort, and actions to conserve shared stocks. This article reviews empirical evidence on the performance of fishery cooperatives in developed and developing countries. A key conclusion is that using a combination of rights-based instruments can achieve efficiencies that cannot be captured by any single instrument. (JEL: Q20, Q22, D23). Copyright 2012, Oxford University Press.