INTRODUCTION

Although the previous chapters focused on efforts to establish property rights to land and to change in U.S. land policies, this chapter examines some of the contracting issues encountered in attempts to control access and harvests in fisheries, where there often are serious common pool problems. The losses from common pool conditions in fisheries include declining total catch, falling income for fishermen, overcapitalization through too many vessels and too much gear, and excessive labor input. These losses provide important incentives for fishermen to contract among themselves and with politicians and bureaucrats to reduce fishing in order to bring total catch to more optimal levels. Nevertheless for many of the reasons identified in this chapter, the contracting record in numerous fisheries is one of only partial success. Differences among fishermen according to skill, capital, and size create conflicting interests and incentives for regulating fishing. These differences limit the informal agreements that might be reached among fishermen to reduce fishing and diminish the effectiveness of fishermen as cohesive lobbyists for influencing more formal regulatory controls on access and harvest in open access fisheries. As a result for some species, catch and incomes for fishermen have fallen sharply and stocks have been depleted. In response, regulatory policies have been adopted to rebuild the stock and to raise incomes, but they frequently have been very costly and relatively ineffective. In other more extreme cases, overfishing has so depleted stocks of some species that they are no longer commercially viable.