Whose right to manage? Distribution of property rights affects equity and power dynamics in comanagement

Abstract

Rights-based management approaches are being increasingly applied to global fisheries as an alternative to deficiencies associated with centralized or top-down management. In fisheries, these approaches may include a diversity of methods such as catch shares, territorial user rights for fishing, individual transferable quotas, fisheries concessions, cooperatives, and comanagement. Many of these approaches are being implemented in small-scale fisheries contexts, without full consideration of how the legacy of previous governing institutions or tenure arrangements may affect implementation. Likewise, few case studies examine whether rights-based management approaches are appropriate for given contexts, examine how they fit within a nested administrative hierarchy, or describe their shared property rights components in practice. These knowledge gaps may obscure key stewardship incentives, veil existing power relations, and constrain opportunities for different management models while also prolonging or preventing governance transformations. We illustrate the importance of these factors through a case study of institutional change in coral reef fisheries in Hawaiʻi. We use institutional analysis to examine coral reef fisheries management across two time periods: historical marine tenure in the Hawaiian Kingdom (1810-1893) and under contemporary centralized management (1982-2018). We then compared these management regimes to emerging comanagement in Hawaiʻi (1994-2018). Our analysis reveals that few rights are actually devolved to communities seeking to implement comanagement. We also highlight considerable administrative complexity and variability within historical marine tenure regimes. We conclude by considering several issues relevant to the performance of rights-based approaches such as comanagement, including devolution of property rights to the local level, matching administrative and social-ecological complexity, the importance of historical context and narratives in shaping solutions, and the perceived legitimacy of governance arrangements.

Access to marine ecosystem services: Examining entanglement and legitimacy in customary institutions

“…Instead, in Ahus, the legitimacy of customary institutions has gradually faded. This change mirrors a more creeping change in legitimacy found in an institutional analysis in Hawai'i, where comanagement legitimized different parts of local institutions by recognizing and codifying historically legitimate claims and fusing them across governance-scales, within the constraints of the legitimacy of previous governance arrangements (Ayers et al, 2018). Thus, while we agree that decision-makers must 'consider historically legitimate claims by actors… to manage the landscape' (Berbés-Blázquez et al, 2017, p. 139), our findings caution that what is considered historically legitimate may be contested.…”

Drivers of Small-Scale Fishers’ Willingness to Adopt Property Rights Co-Management in the Lake Nokoué and Porto-Novo Lagoon Complex in Southeast Benin

“…Additionally, within property rights co-management alternatives, such segmentation of the fishers seems appropriate because they may have a different point of view [81]. The LCL model can be principally convenient for detecting sub-groups of people who could benefit from a common intervention based on their shared characteristics [82].…”

What Do Values Have to Do With It?: Resilience of Two Types of Farmers in Hawai‘i to the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Therefore, communities often go through community-based subsistence fishing areas (CBSFAs), Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), or seek administrative rule changes to gain access to an area and engage in co-management. These processes often involve unequal power relations and a disregard for different world views and data types (Ayers et al, 2018). While there have been legislative wins (see Hobart, 2017;McMillen et al, 2017;Vaughan et al, 2017), the time, effort and adherence to bureaucratic red tape required to achieve those wins has often minimized their scale and efficacy (Vaughan and Caldwell, 2015).…”