Search

In the global context of the fisheries overexploitation crisis it is crucial to understand how small-scale fishing communities in developing countries can govern themselves to limit fishing effort to their fishing grounds. We conducted a comparative analysis to assess the performance of two policy tools: individual-single-species fishing permits and multi-species-specific concessions. We compared two neighboring small-scale fishing communities in the Gulf of California Mexico that use the same harvesting technology, exploit the same species in roughly the same ecological conditions, but have devised very different institutional arrangement at the local level to control access to their fishing grounds. We found that the community using fishing permits as its main policy tool operated under an open access regime and had overexploited its fishery, while the other community had been able to successfully control access to its fishing grounds and avoid overexploitation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]