Paper Fish and Policy Conflict: Catch Shares and Ecosystem-Based Management in Maine's Groundfishery

High-grading and over-quota discarding in mixed fisheries

“…Many papers are not included in Table 2, because the discarding that resulted from constraining quotas can either be high-grading or over-quota discarding (e.g. Richards 1994;Baelde 2001;Brewer 2011;Cullis-Suzuki et al 2012;Catchpole et al 2014;Mace et al 2014).…”

Revisiting Maine’s lobster commons: rescaling political subjects

“…A second cluster pertains to individual and household livelihood strategies within the context of local economies. Evidence integrates prior empirical work with my own field data conducted between 1989 and 2012 (Acheson and Brewer 2000;Brewer 2010Brewer , 2011Brewer , 2012.…”

“…They felt particularly justified in doing so since most lobstermen had been closed out of scalloping and groundfishing by federal regulations supported by some scallop and groundfish permit holders. Interestingly, those closures were accomplished through the New England Fishery Management Council, which is itself a co-management entity, albeit a regional one with little opportunity for local input (Butler et al 2001;Brewer 2011). These cascading changes in fisheries policy and regulatory frameworks, initiated at the federal level, but advanced at the state and local level, have reconfigured the political subjectivities of lobster license holders.…”

“…Assessment scientists generally assume that their datasets have sufficient spatial and temporal coverage to incorporate these variables, despite extensive evidence to the contrary (Ludwig et al 1993;Wilson et al 1999;Jackson et al 2001;Ames 2004;Walters et al 2005). More concerning, "limited access" and "catch share" policies promoted increasingly by federal managers since the 1980s, and intended to maintain maximum sustainable yield, discourage fishermen from adapting to dynamic marine systems by shifting fishing effort among a number of target species (Wilson et al 1991;Brewer 2011). Regulatory mechanisms reflecting these policies prevent the entry of new fishermen, locking holders of permits into maximal usage of each existing permit, to avoid losing it in the likelihood of future regulatory restrictions on purportedly "underutilized" permits or harvest allocations.…”

Gambling Debt: Iceland's Rise and Fall in the Global Economy

“…Ironically, neoliberal ideology seeking to diminish the role of government often favors devolution of rule-making to more local organizations. ITQ advocates would probably consider many of the successful mechanisms used locally-such as community quotas, license banks, pooling cooperatives, and locally designed trip limits-to be desirable, so it is ironic that when local fishermen ask senior government officials to institute gear regulations for the protection of stocks (Brewer 2011), these same advocates reject them as undesirable because they can create "inefficiency." Such a position loses sight of the fact that a fishery has to be effectively pursued before efficiency can be considered and that fishermen often have the most practical ideas for preventing undesirable outcomes.…”