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Humboldt Field Research Institute

Posted January 7, 2000

Co-management may point way to resource conservation

Fish stocks may be in trouble from Asia to New England, but Maine's lobster fishery continues to deliver record high harvests. Jim Acheson, an anthropologist and a Sea Grant researcher at the University of Maine, knows that the state's success with lobster is not just an accident of nature.

Acheson is the author of a landmark study of the industry, The Lobster Gangs of Maine, published in 1988. Today, he conducts research on fisheries management with UMaine economist Jim Wilson. Both are affiliated with UMaine's School of Marine Sciences.

Acheson and Wilson helped to set up Maine's lobster management zones and, with Sea Grant funding, they are now gathering lessons learned world wide about fisheries managed cooperatively by governments and fishermen.

One of the world's first co-management laws

“It's an exciting time,” says Acheson. “Maine has one of the first co-management laws in the world.” In 1995, the Maine legislature passed a law to establish locally elected lobster management councils with authority over three aspects of fishing: trap limits, the number of traps on a single line and the time when fishing is allowed.

The term “co-management” refers to arrangements in which government agencies and resource users jointly establish and enforce the operating rules. This cooperative relationship departs from business as usual in which rules are set and enforced by government.

This new arrangement has grown from a tradition of active political involvement by the lobster industry. For example, industry efforts to get the legislature to set size limitations go back to the late 1800s. Later, the v-notch law, a succcessful program that protects large broodstock lobsters, was passed in 1948.

For many years, these rules were unique to Maine. Today they extend to U.S. waters in the Gulf of Maine as far south as Cape Cod. Their expansion demonstrates the importance the lobster industry has placed on conservation. That commitment was also behind establishment of the new lobster councils.

In an effort to consider how co-management might be applied to other fisheries, Acheson and Wilson are studying successful co-management systems in Canada, Japan, Australia and Norway. Their goal is to identify the conditions under which people are willing to constrain their own behavior to benefit the common good.

“All too often that is not the , and you get a tragedy of the commons,” says Acheson. “One of the critical questions we have to ask in resource management is when, where, how and under what conditions you can get user groups to pass rules to constrain themselves for communal benefit. From an individual perspective, the problem is that if you don't get the resource now, someone else is going to come along and take it in a couple of hours. It is not at all clear in the social science literature under what conditions people will pass effective rules.”

The idea of co-management, says Acheson, has been criticized by opponents who feel it gives too much authority to special interest groups. “They feel it's like the fox guarding the chicken house,” he adds.

Trap limits imposed

In a paper accepted for publication in the Society of Natural Resources, Acheson and Laura Taylor, an employee of the Maine Department of Marine Resources, note that all seven Maine lobster councils have imposed trap limits on lobster fishermen within their zones. Acheson and Taylor also cite the case of Monhegan Island whose fishermen have imposed severe limitations on themselves to protect the lobster population.

“They have long recognized that the island's waters contained a limited resource and that they would have to generate rules to conserve the resource if they wanted to continue to make a living,” they write.

One of the world's oldest traditional co-management systems exists in Japan, Acheson says, where Fishery Cooperative Associations (FCA) have roots going back about one thousand years. “It's really cove by cove management. They own ocean, a legal right. If someone comes along and wants to build a condominium or drill for oil or dump anything in the water, they don't do it unless they buy out the FCA, because the FCA owns that ocean.”

In Australia and Canada, arrangements developed by native peoples have been recognized in national law. Australia's Aborigine people, for example, developed a way to manage sea bass that is part of the country's modern fishery management system.

“We've got 13 out of the world's 16 major fisheries in crisis, including all of the groundfisheries in the Gulf of Maine. There are very few cases where things have been done right. One of them is the Maine lobster fishery, and there's a lot that we can learn from that case,” he says.

Councils face conflicts

Despite their successes, the new lobster management councils must steer their way through rough water stirred by serious conflicts. Some are deep seated, such as the different interests of full-time fishermen and part timers. Others stem from new policies, such as a the boundary lines adopted to separate one zone from another and the inherent difficulties in managing political activities in the zones.

The industry as a whole has benefited from the conservation ethic that was effectively adopted between the first and second world wars, Acheson notes. In 1919, annual harvests took a dive and averaged five to six million pounds per year. It wasn't until the later part of the 1940s that, as more fishermen followed conservation practices such as v-notching, harvests began to grow steadily. In the last three years, they have exceeded 46 million pounds annually.

Several important factors contribute to this success, says Acheson, and make co-management for lobsters effective. They include:

1) The local nature of the industry in which groups of fishermen cooperate harbor by harbor and defend their territories.

2) Rules that are in accord with the industry's view of how the ocean works.

3) Effective enforcement based on detection of violations.

While these factors support the co-management system, the ability of the councils to handle conflicts will determine their future, Acheson emphasizes. Moreover, on top of the local issues, the councils have been used by the federal government to respond to broader concerns such as right whale conservation. They have performed better than many observers expected, but addressing such concerns has tended to draw the councils away from their primary mission and the fishermen they were elected to represent.

In 2000, Acheson will spend a year as a visiting research professor at the Workshop for Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University, one of the nation's premier think tanks for resource management. He plans to write a book on co-management with special attention to the case of Maine lobster.

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