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Abstract:The failures of traditional target-species management have led many to propose an ecosystem approach to fisheries to promote sustainability. The ecosystem approach is necessary, especially to account for fishery-ecosystem interactions, but by itself is not sufficient to address two important factors contributing to unsustainable fisheries: inappropriate incentives bearing on fishers and the ineffective governance that frequently exists in commercial, developed fisheries managed primarily by total-harvest limits and input controls. We contend that much greater emphasis must be placed on fisher motivation when managing fisheries. Using evidence from more than a dozen natural experiments in commercial fisheries, we argue that incentive-based approaches that better specify community and individual harvest or territorial rights and price ecosystem services and that are coupled with public research, monitoring, and effective oversight promote sustainable fisheries. 710 Résumé : Les échecs des aménagements traditionnels centrés sur les espèces-cibles ont incité plusieurs chercheurs à proposer des approches halieutiques basées sur les écosystèmes pour favoriser les pêches durables. L'approche écosys-témique est nécessaire, en particulier, pour tenir compte des interactions pêche-écosystème; elle ne suffit pas, cependant, par elle-même pour régler deux facteurs importants qui contribuent à rendre les pêches non durables : les incitations insuffisantes pour les pêcheurs et la gestion inefficace souvent présente dans les pêches commerciales déve-loppées qui sont régies principalement par des limites à la récolte totale et par des contrôles d'entrée. Nous croyons qu'on doit mettre beaucoup plus l'accent sur la motivation des pêcheurs dans la gestion de la pêche. En utilisant des données provenant de plus d'une douzaine d'expériences naturelles de pêche commerciale, nous cherchons à démontrer que des approches fondées sur les incitations qui précisent mieux la communauté, les récoltes individuelles et les droits territoriaux et qui évaluent aussi financièrement les services de l'écosystème, couplées avec de la recherche gouvernementale, de la surveillance et de la gestion efficace, promeuvent les pêches commerciales durables.[Traduit par la Rédaction] Grafton et al.

Tight coupling to ecosystems and dependence on common-pool resources threaten fisheries and aquaculture.

The British Columbia halibut fishery provides a natural experiment of the effects of "privatizing the commons". Using firm-level data from the fishery two years before private harvesting rights were introduced, the year they were implemented and three years afterwards, a stochastic frontier is estimated to test for changes in technical, allocative and economic efficiency. Despite some improvement in short-run measures of cost efficiency, overall the fishing fleet still remains well below the best practice frontier. The relatively few short-run efficiency gains are attributed to deficiencies in the property right and the possibility that fishers may require several years to optimize their operations. By contrast, the results indicate an immediate and significant increase in producer surplus and unit rents which are directly attributable to the privatization. The results suggest that if the full benefits of privatization are to be realized, careful attention must be given to properly specifying all the characteristics of the property right.

With a mounting imperative to advance stewardship strategies that consider the special features of the deep ocean and ensure that this biome serves future generations, we must promote long-term, deep-ocean sustainability through precaution, knowledge creation, and governance development.