California Sea Grant College Program

Fishery co-management has recently garnered a considerable amount of interest from fishermen and regulators in both developed and developing countries. The trend is in response to the failure of traditional fishery management, which relied on direct command-and-control regulations, and as an alternative to other individual-rights-based systems, including individual transferable quotas. The key feature of fishery co-management is that fishermen form a group to manage the fishery in a collective manner based on mutually agreed rules. Community-based fishery co-management has been actively promoted both by local governments, particularly in developing countries, and by international aid institutions.

Despite increasing interest and attention, however, fishery co-management is not yet well understood. Economists have been skeptical about the effectiveness and sustainability of such resource management regimes, primarily because they involve collective action by individual fishermen. Other disciplines such as sociology and anthropology, on the other hand, have been studying co-management regimes for some time, mainly from a qualitative point of view. To generalize the factors that are key to successful fishery management, it is necessary to go beyond case studies and quantitatively examine different types of fishery co-management regimes, their "rules of the game," and institutional designs.

This study investigates fishery co-management regimes adopted in coastal fisheries in Japan. Utilizing the nationwide abundance of fishery co-management examples, it searches for key co-management measures and operations beyond the layers of tra­ ditional, cultural, and social influences. The study focuses on the rules of the game adopted by Japan's co-managing groups, called Fishery Management Organizations (FMOs). An examination of several cases of successful fishery co-management iden­tified two distinctive measures: effort coordination and pooling arrangements. Anec­dotal evidence suggests that a pooling arrangement is a vital supporting measure for effective coordination, suggesting that these two measures may be essential to suc­cessful fishery co-management. The challenge is how to align individual fishermen's incentives with those of the group. A conceptual dynamic model developed in this study shows that such alignment is likely to occur when pooling arrangements are employed. The model shows that full pooling achieves perfect alignment, which may explain why full pooling is the dominant choice among FMOs with pooling arrange­ments.

Hypotheses from the case studies and conceptual model are subsequently tested with real-world data from two sources—Japan's fishery census published by the gov­ernment and data from a survey developed and conducted by the author. The survey was designed to supplement the fishery census by collecting information on effort co­ordination and self-imposed regulations. The results from the two empirical analyses indicate that (1) merely establishing co-managing groups, such as FMOs, has limited effect; (2) FMOs with pooling arrangements generate greater revenue, particularly when combined with effort coordination activities; and (3) pooling arrangements and effort coordination coupled with marketing activities resulted in the greatest revenue.