Elinor Ostrom, who shares this year’s Nobel Prize for Economics, laid much of the intellectual foundation for EDF’s current work with fishery cooperatives. Catch shares evolved from common property theory and empirical observations that, under certain conditions, resources such as fish, water, or pasture land tend to be overexploited when property rights are not clearly delineated. Ostrom’s research shows that resource users can develop cooperative methods to avoid overexploiting resources and dissipating wealth through competition. 

While some say that this idea “challenges” the conventional wisdom, research conducted by EDF’s Ocean Innovations suggests that competitive and cooperative dynamics depend on scale and the attributes of the communities themselves. Our results will soon be published in the Bulletin of Marine Science. This research and our experience with fishermen on the water motivates our work with the Cape Cod Commercial Hook Fishermen’s Association and the Morro Bay Community Based Fishing Association, two pioneering efforts to cooperatively manage fisheries. 

We believe that cooperative approaches can complement catch shares, which often apply at larger scales and to more industrial, less socially cohesive fishing communities. Such approaches are also broadly applicable in many developing countries, where social values are emphasized over individualism and economic gain, and where legal and political structures facilitate the delegation of resource use privileges to groups.