Managing Fisheries by Assigning Rights to Harvester Cooperatives

Managing fisheries by delegating authority to an association of users 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 its inputs centrally. Evidence from developed country fisheries managed by coops indicates that these coordination gains can be substantial and that they often take forms overlooked in the traditional fishery reform literature, including gains 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 paper reviews theoretical arguments for why collective action in exercising fishing rights can bring economic gains and summarizes empirical evidence on the performance of fishery coops in developed and developing country contexts.