Stewards of the sea. Giving power to fishers

Exploiting fish resources from the sea requires effective management. Results and ideas from behavioural economics are used to propose a way in which a fisher directed management process could improve compliance with regulations. The paper first explores why fishers have been subject to increasingly bureaucratic top-down management systems that often mean that fisher’s knowledge and experience is ignored, creating resentment and encouraging avoidance of regulations. A way is then developed by which permission to fish would be contingent on the fishers managing their fishery sustainably. It is argued that ownership of the management process will be one incentive for fishers to fish sustainably. It is also proposed that a fisher-directed management system allows access to the fishery as a public good for practitioners of the fishery and that with suitable peer penalties for cheating, such a system would be stable. The way a fisher-directed management system would work is sketched and it is proposed that it could first be introduced for a fishery such as the pelagic trawler fleet in the Northeast Atlantic or for inshore fisheries carried out by a well-defined community.