Regulating the access to fisheries: learning from European experiences

The pressure on aquatic renewable resources has rapidly increased over past decades as a result of both sustained high demand and technological innova tion. The relative scarcity of fishing resources is not new, but it seems t oday to have become a generalised phenomena for most aquatic ecosystems fro m local to oceanic scales. Either motivated by the desire to regulate confl icts between groups of fishermen (gears, communities, etc.) or to improve e fficiency by internalising part of free access externalities, fisheries man agement appears fundamentally to represent a process of access rule definit ion and implementation. Whatever is the instrument (output or input based, regulatory or economic, market oriented or not) it is the structure of acce ss rights that is initially affected. There is nothing original in the fact that increasing relative scarcity calls for property right structure chang es. It is also not surprising that in many cases, creating an access right structure provides an opportunity for a market expression of resource value . But in the case of fisheries resource appropriation is not as simple or e asy as on land. Mobility and variability of the resource, diversity of fish ing techniques interacting over stocks or areas, makes the case more diffic ult. Furthermore, management instruments are not as similar as the economic theory of management implies. Therefore, there is no straightforward answe r. This is the reason why many different routes have been chosen to regulat e world fisheries. In practice, efficiency and equity objectives are rarely successfully met. The European Union, with the Common Fisheries Policy and the various local or national management schemes, offers a fair range of s uch examples. Referring to European examples, the key issues in the debate over fisheries management are considered. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. Al l rights reserved.