www.dagliano.uni-bocconi.it DEVELOPMENT STUDIES WORKING PAPERS Collective Action for Local-Level Effort Regulation: an Assessment of Recent Experiences in Senegalese Small-Scale Fisheries

* This study would not have been possible without the financial support of the Fondation Universitaire pour la Coopération Internationale au Développement (FUCID) and the Centre de Recherche en Economie du Développement (CRED), both at the university of Namur. This support is gratefully acknowledged as well as the collaboration of partner institutions in Senegal, the Centre de Recherche et de Développement de Technologies Intermédiaires pour la Pêche (CREDETIP) and the Collectif National des Pêcheurs Sénégalais (CNPS). The latter played a major role to facilitate our preliminary contacts with the surveyed fishing communities and demonstrated great willingness to exchange views with us. Ousseynou Dieng, researcher at the CREDETIP, was a key performer at the level of data collection and coding. He was responsible for the direct supervision of the team of field investigators during the household survey and was continuously present on the field sites from the beginning of the data-collection process. As director of CREDETIP, Aliou Sall assumed on-the-spot responsibility for the administration of the project. François Migeotte and Catherine Mélard, both from CRED, were the direct collaborators of Ousseynou Dieng and made an important contribution at the level of collection, coding and processing of the data as well as in the writing of insightful field notes and preliminary reports. Finally, the Centre de Recherche Océanographique de Dakar-Thiaroye (CRODT) provided us with price and output series for a number of fish species. Note that one of the two authors, Frederic Gaspart, is chargé de recherche at the FNRS (Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique) but located in the university of Namur. 2 Essentially, success or failure of collective action depends on two sets of factors. First are the characteristics of the people concerned, such as the size of the group they are forming, the extent of their heterogeneity, and the social capital at their disposal understood as their tradition of cooperation in other areas than the one considered. Heterogeneity may result from a variety of sources, such as differences in exit opportunities, in time horizons, in resource uses or techniques adopted to exploit them, in skill levels or capital endowments, etc. Second we find the characteristics of the technical, economic, and political environment that bear upon the enforcement costs of a collective scheme. Technical aspects may refer to the physical attributes of a common-pool resource such as its location, its degree of compactness, the frequency and predictability of its produce …