Fishing in Market-Based Resource Management
The transformation of the fisheries in the wake of modern resource management has gathered much attention from social scientists highlighting different aspects of the relation between coastal communities, markets and the state. The purpose of this chapter
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Before we set sail on our journey to investigate Bjartur‘s metamorphosis from community-bound rural fisher to independent entrepreneur and investor, it is worth considering the broader social and political context in which the fishing industry has transformed and changed. Hence, especially in the 1970s, the role of the state in organising society has changed dramatically with the neoliberal revolutions of the Reagan and Thatcher administrations of the 1980s a (Harvey, 2005). Following the ideas of influential economists such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, this policy shift commonly assumed that the market mechanism is the most efficient means for the distribution and allocation of societal wealth, with the state being reduced to the role of a nightwatchman who oversees and enforces the laws of competition and exchange. Consequently, formerly state run institutions such as transport, education and health care have been fully or de facto privatised in many industrial nations, with even archetypical welfare states such as Sweden following suit the call for privatisation and competition in the public sector (Svallfors & Tyllström, 2018). In the wake of this general ‘state phobia’ (Foucault, 2008: 75), also the adherence of resource economists and policy makers to market-based environmentalism grew and became © The Author(s) 2019 A. Dobeson, Revaluing Coastal Fisheries, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05087-0_2
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the major paradigm to solve a wide-ranging issues of environmental problems caused by pollution and depletion of common pool resources such as air, water and fish (Keohane & Olmstead, 2007). Market-based approaches to modern resource management commonly assume that unregulated access to resources will inevitably lead to a Tragedy of the Commons (Hardin, 1968), as there is no economic incentive for rationally acting individuals to stop putting pressure on a common good unless it becomes either devastated or limited by a regulating leviathan. Key to this reasoning is the conceptualisation of man as homo oeconomicus, namely a rational, utility-maximising agent who considers no utility but his own. In other words, economic actors have no other motivation than maximising profits through increasing pressure on a given resource. In order to discipline economic man, resource economists believe that the market mechanism is superior to top-down state control by ensuring that resources are utilised only by the most efficient users. Consequently, the privatisation of the commons and the establishment of property rights is the inevitable precondition for ensuring the sustainable and efficient allocation of natural resources (Hannesson, 2004). In contemporary fisheries management, market-based solutions to environmental problems have been especially pronounced and widely promoted as best practice solution to the problem of overfishing. Accordingly, proponents of property-rights based approaches see a system of Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs)1—freely exchangeable fishing rights that can b
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