Abstract
There are somewhere between 50 and 150 million people in the world who make their living through small-scale fisheries operating in coastal waters. They catch fish and harvest other marine resources, using all kinds of innovative methods. Unfortunately, despite their ingenuity, many of these operations are suffering from “the tragedy of the commons.” The tragedy is the overuse of a common resource leading to its collapse.* The question is, How does a fishery agree to take no more than its fair share? What is a fair share, anyway?
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Notes
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* The “commons” in the original discussion on the “tragedy of the commons,” as portrayed in the famous paper by Garret Hardin (Hardin 1968), referred to the old English “common” that was shared by local herders. In fact, there were strong controls over who had access to these pastures (Dietz et al. 2003), and so the resource was not degraded as much as a true commons where open access is possible. Most deep sea fisheries and some coastal ones are true commons.
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© 2012 Brian Walker and David Salt
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Walker, B., Salt, D. (2012). People and Pen Shells, Marine Parks and Rules:. In: Resilience Practice. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-231-0_8
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