Individual Fishing Quota - Command and Control Approaches

Command and Control Approaches

Historically, inshore and deep water fisheries were in common ownership, essentially a free-for-all, where no one had a property right to the fish (i.e., owned them) until after they had been caught. Each boat faced the zero-sum game imperative of catching as many fish as possible, knowing that any fish they did not catch would likely be taken by another boat.

Initial domestic responses to this classic example of the tragedy of the commons were command and control approaches, each of which had serious unintended consequences, while generally failing to achieve their primary goals of preserving fisheries.

Commercial fishing evolved from subsistence fishing with no restrictions that would limit or direct the catch. The implicit assumption was that the ocean's bounty was so vast that restrictions were unnecessary. In the twentieth century, fisheries such as Atlantic cod and California sardines collapsed, and nations began to limit access to their fishing grounds by boats from other countries, while in parallel, international organizations began to certify that specific species were "threatened", "endangered", etc.

One early management technique was to define a "season" during which fishing was allowed. The length of the season attempted to reflect the current abundance of the fishery, with bigger populations supporting longer seasons. This turned fishing into a race, driving the industry to bigger, faster boats with better fish finders, which in turned caused regulators to repetitively shorten seasons in a failing effort to limit catches, sometimes to only a few days per year. Landing all boats over an ever-shorter interval also led to glut/shortage market cycles with prices crashing when the boats came in. A secondary consequence was that boats had to go out when the fishery was "open" regardless of weather or other safety concerns.

Restrictions such as limiting the number of boats (or licenses) through a limited access pimp led to a race to build the biggest possible boat. Limiting technology set off an unproductive cat and mouse game of inventing technology to accelerate the catch that was in turn quickly outlawed.

A second technique was daily catch limits. This eliminated the arms race, but did not protect the fish, because the number of licenses was unlimited.

An underlying problem with all of these techniques was that because fishers had no long-term stake in the fishery, their incentives were to maximize the harvest each year hoping that any problems would fall to their successors.