PAP0327 - Crime, Enforcement and Compliance: Guidelines for the Reform of the Common Fisheries Policy

Public enforcement of law, that is, the use of public agents to detect and sanction violators of legal rules, is an obvious important theoretical and empirical subject for Social Sciences. First literature dates from eighteen century: Montesquieu, Beccaria and Bentham. Curiously, after the sophisticated analysis of Bentham, the subject “lay essentially dormant” in socio-economics scholarship (Polinsky and Shavell, 2000), until the influential article of Becker, 1968, “Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach”. In the context of Fisheries Socio-Economics, the problem can be seen as an externality arising when exclusive property rights are absent (Cheung, 1970). That absence depends, among other things, on the costs of defining and enforcing exclusivity. In spite of the theme’s importance, monitoring and enforcement considerations have been largely ignored in the study of fishery management. This paper explores this issue with a formal model to show how fishing firms behave and fisheries policies are affected by costly, imperfect enforcement of law. The theoretical analysis combines a standard bio-socio-economic model of fisheries (Gordon/Schaefer) with Becker’s theory of Crime and Punishment. The model sustains a rule of optimal behavior for a homo economicus operator: For a given stock size, the firm sets its catch rate at a level in excess of its quota, where marginal profits equal the expected marginal penalty. Model conclusions are used to discuss the design of the control regime of the Common Fisheries Policy and the guidelines the Commission has been proposing for next CFP reform (2012). Implementing common policies is never easy, especially when myopic individual interests do not match with long term collective interests. This is the fisheries case. Without a clear and effective policy of control, the Commission is certain that the Tragedy of the Commons (over-fishing) will result. According to Becker, individuals rationally decide whether or not engage in criminal activities by comparing the expected returns to crime with the legitimate business. The Commission proposals seem to give a special attention to the increase of the probability of detection as a means to deter criminal behavior and increase compliance with regulation. The introduction of severe penalties is not a priority. The Commission believes that financial support will guarantee the indispensable means of surveillance and increase the deterrence capacity of Member States (in uniform manner), the transparency and trust between partners. The Commission knows that legal administrations have significant differences and that the judicial organization has a great inertia. The efficiency of Justice is not only a question of financial means. It has cultural and historical roots. It is virtually impossible to put all the Member States in uniform position in terms of speed and severity of penalty application.

Manuel F. Pacheco Coelho é Doutorado e Agregado em Economia, pelo Instituto Superior de Economia e Gestão da Universidade Técnica de Lisboa, onde é Professor, desde 1984.
A Economia dos Recursos Naturais e Ambiente, a Economia Regional e Urbana, e as questões da Integração Europeia constituem as suas áreas de investigação privilegiadas, com vasta obra publicada. Na área da Sociologia, os seus estudos têm recaído, especialmente, em temáticas da Maritime Sociology.
É membro do SOCIUS/ISEG e integra a Comissão Executiva do CIRIUS /ISEG.
É professor do programa Doutoral MIT - Portugal em Sustainable Energy Systems.

PAP0328 - Fisheries: The Tragedy of the Commons Revisited and the Return of Co-Management

In the literature on Natural Resources it would be difficult to find a concept as misunderstood as commons and common property. Important researchers in the field of Natural Resource Socio-Economics do not distinguish between the concepts of common property and non-property. But, that distinction is crucial for the design of Natural Resources Management Policy. Schlager and Ostrom (1992) remind that Political Economy’s understanding of property rights, and the rules used to create and enforce them, shape perceptions of resource degradation problems and prescriptions recommended to solve such problems. “Ambiguous terms blur analytical and prescriptive clarity” and the term “common property” is a glaring example. One of the purposes of this paper is to rectify this confusion and establish an adequate conceptualisation. So, a typology of property-rights regimes relevant to common property resources is presented and the reflex of this distinction between regimes on the design of the natural resources policy is discussed. In this context, the paper also discusses the legacy of Nobel prized researcher E. Ostrom. Her work is fundamental in the substitution of the “Tragedy” metaphor to the more interesting “Drama of the Commons”. Of course we’ll have tragedies, in the open access/ res-nullius situation, but sometimes we’ll have also reasons to laugh. Ostrom stresses that a commons can be well governed and that most people, when presented with a resource problem, can cooperate and act for the common good. “Co-management” and self–regulation are the keys for sustainable resource management. A particular example of this kind of preoccupations is the fisheries case (Gutiérrez et al, 2011). A third of the fish stocks worldwide are over exploited. Using individual cases many researchers have been arguing that community–based management should prevent the commons tragedies and that cooperative management often results in sustainable fisheries. Our paper surveys the contribution of several studies of evaluation of those experiences. This analysis identifies strong leadership and robust social capital as important factors of success of co-management in the fisheries case.

Manuel F. Pacheco Coelho é Doutorado e Agregado em Economia, pelo Instituto Superior de Economia e Gestão da Universidade Técnica de Lisboa, onde é Professor, desde 1984.
A Economia dos Recursos Naturais e Ambiente, a Economia Regional e Urbana, e as questões da Integração Europeia constituem as suas áreas de investigação privilegiadas, com vasta obra publicada. Na área da Sociologia, os seus estudos têm recaído, especialmente, em temáticas da Maritime Sociology.
É membro do SOCIUS/ISEG e integra a Comissão Executiva do CIRIUS /ISEG.
É professor do programa Doutoral MIT - Portugal em Sustainable Energy Systems.