Overfishing threatens ocean ecosystems and economies. To encourage marine biodiversity protection without restricting commercial activities, governments are creating new quota based property rights that are designed to curb commercial fishing pressure without stifling economic exchange. Over ten percent of the world's fisheries are currently managed by quota systems, a percentage that increases each year. Yet, who should get quota and how quota markets should be regulated, remains unclear. This project will examine factors shaping how quota management systems influence the ecological and economic development of fisheries and fishing communities. This study will provide critical information about the management of marine fisheries for economic growth and biodiversity. The results will be useful to fisheries experts and people involved in community and indigenous economic development, including in the United States, where fisheries are increasingly being managed under quota systems that stipulate quota to be allocated to indigenous tribes. The findings from this project will be made available publicly on the investigator's website for feedback from community members, scientists, and policy makers.
This research will contribute to broader debates over the extent to which market-based conservation initiatives, including quota markets for fisheries and carbon cap-and-trade programs, incentivize sustainable environmental practices. This will be done by looking to New Zealand, where the world's first nationally comprehensive quota system was implemented in 1986, with legally mandated provisions for quota to be allocated to indigenous tribes. Today, Maori own over 40 percent of the nation's fishing quota, making New Zealand an important case through which to examine barriers and opportunities for more equitable distribution of the ecological and economic benefits of quota regulation. This project will enhance understanding of market-based conservation by expanding upon the economic assumption that quota and total allowable catch reduction limits set by government are the driving force behind fisheries development, and that the market is the best mechanism to encourage environmental sustainability and economic growth. By examining how people engage with fisheries when access to commercial markets is restricted by quota rights, this research will explore reasons why individuals do not always act as the rational economic actor that fisheries rationalization advocates require for their models of industry-led sustainable development. Specifically, this project will use ethnographic methods and quantitative analysis of fishery catch data to examine the role that colonial histories, indigenous identities, knowledge, technology and access to markets each play in influencing how people engage with fisheries development.
