11 - Property Rights and Institutional Arrangements in Southeast Asian Fisheries

Summary

ABSTRACT

This paper reviews and synthesises available literature about fisheries management, property rights systems, and other institutional arrangements.

It begins with an overview of the fundamental components of rights-based systems and uses this information to analyse the similarities and difference of common characteristics of the property rights systems spectrum, from conventional to alternative. The paper also gives an overview of various elements of community-based and co-management approaches – i.e., the ways in which stakeholders, especially fishers, communities, and governments interact. The paper examines the community-based fisheries management systems in several case studies from fisheries in Southeast Asia, looking at the respective elements of (i) rights-based systems and (ii) collaborative management approaches.

In closing, the paper identifies some of the current knowledge gaps and their implications for region-wide research and policy towards improving well-being amongst poor fisheriesdependent households in Southeast Asia.

INTRODUCTION

In the fisheries management arena, three lessons have been learned over time:

1. Fisheries are finite and as a result, catch has to be similarly finite. Even tropical fisheries have a finite number of fish, and there must be limits to the amount of fish caught.

2. Since fisheries are finite, not everyone can make a profit out of it. Participation in fisheries also has to be finite, which means that access to capture fisheries must be limited.

3. Even if access and participation are limited, fishermen can still overfish their fisheries. There are many examples of limited access fisheries that have either implicit or explicit limits on total catches (total allowable catches or TACs) and are overfished, over capacitated, and unprofitable. Thus, it is not enough to limit participation and catch; there also has to be a sharing mechanism that determines clearly who gets what.

In addition, there are two more lessons increasingly being understood by fishermen, policy makers, and fisheries managers. First is that centrally imposed, command and control regulatory regimes are not compatible with commercial forces that exist in fisheries. Indeed, command and control schedules increase fishing costs for fishermen and motivate them to catch more fish, either legally or, in desperation, illegally.