Private Rights and Co-Management: Understanding What Leads to Stewardship in Five Australian Abalone Fisheries

One of the key challenges facing fishery managers, policy-makers and researchers has been designing management systems that encourage fishers to act sustainably. Catch shares and co-management are two approaches that have received increasing attention in recent years, but how they function to shape behaviour is poorly understood. This talk outlines five cases of co-management from abalone fisheries in southeast Australia. All are managed through individual transferable quotas and each industry group has, to varying degrees, voluntarily increased size limits, reduced quotas or implemented additional management practices above and beyond government regulations.

This talk aims to briefly explore the key drivers of these initiatives in an effort to better understand what is contributing to the stewardship behaviour observed in these systems. Data was collected from over 80 semi-structured interviews, observations from 20 collaborative management workshops and a structured survey of 126 fishing industry members. At the group level, perceptions of the resource condition and levels of cooperative capacity both appeared to be important factors, correlating closely with the extent of management initiatives. Leadership, financial stress, the level of government support and the fairness of the industry management process also appeared to have impacts. Interestingly, and in contrast to economic theory, both quota-owners and non-quota-owners supported management initiatives. These results, therefore, both highlight opportunities for policy interventions and raise questions about how individual property rights are specified in modern commercial fisheries.