Use Rights: Overview and Multi-Objective Analysis
By Anthony T. Charles
ABSTRACT
This paper focuses on use rights systems - whether based on territory, inputs (access, effort) or outputs (harvest) - and their role in providing fishers, fisher organizations and/or fishing communities with rights over access and resource use. The paper first provides a brief overview of use rights arrangements, highlighting their importance as regulatory vehicles to help maximize societal benefits accruing from the fishery. From this perspective, attention is focused, through a multi-objective analysis, on the challenge of selecting a desirable use rights system in specific circumstances. Since there is no universally best system, the choice will surely depend on such factors as (a) society's objectives for the fishery, (b) the structure, history and traditions of the fishery, and (c) the relevant social, cultural and economic environment. Particular attention is paid to differential impacts of individual/market and community-based/planned approaches to rights. Both of these approaches are found, for example, in the management of groundfish fisheries on Canada's Atlantic coast, where systems range from individual quotas, whether market-based or nontransferable, to 'competitive quotas' with effort rights, to community management. The latter is based on community quotas, which are allocated to geographically-defined communities. The community quota system brings management to a more local level, as fishers come together to divide up quota (or other forms of rights) and create harvesting plans to suit their local situation. The paper analyses the conditions under which this approach meets such multiple objectives as (a) enhancing community sustainability, through more local determination of fishery operations, (b) building ecological sustainability, by utilizing group dynamics to generate incentives for individual conservation and (c) increasing management efficiency through co-management, self-regulatory incentives, and local-level enforcement.
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