a perspective on (rights-based) approaches as a management tool: words – and lives – matter
TRANSCRIPT
“As I wrote last March: those of us who have
looked to the self-interest of lending institutions
to protect shareholder’s equity (myself
especially) are in a state of shocked disbelief.”
[Testimony of Dr. Alan Greenspan
House Committee of Government Oversight and Reform
October 23, 2008]
“I made a mistake in presuming that
the self-interest of organizations,
specifically banks and others, were
such is that they were best capable
of protecting their own shareholders
and their equity in the firms.”
A perspective on rights-based approaches as a management tool: Words (and lives) matter.
Seth MacinkoDept. of Marine Affairs
University of Rhode [email protected]
My perspective:
We need to be much more careful (and precise) about the words we are using here.
Oh, and I object to your conference title…
What do you mean by rights based? In what sense are rights involved and what kind of
rights? In what sense is a particular program based on rights?
“Rights”??
Human Rights?Indigenous Rights?
User Rights?Tenure Rights?
Beware of
“Strategically Benign Rhetoric“ [Macinko. 2014]
A case study:
Amendment 16– the “sector” program for the New England groundfish fishery,
But this occurs within
The context of “rights based fishing”
ITQs are part of one of the great institutional changes of our times: the enclosure and privatization of the common
resources of the ocean. These are now mostly the exclusive property of the coastal states of the world. [Neher et al.
1989:3]___________Compare to:
This action [a proposed ITQ plan] conveys a share of a common property resource belonging jointly to the people of
the United States to private ownership forever. . . [GMFMC
n.d.]
Only one problem:
Fundamentally Conceptually Confused
Management ≠ Ownership
Confusing science with lawConfusing “Interests” with “rights”Confusing “incentives” with “rights”
Confusing a simple tool with an ideology…
In the fishing context, the term rights
refers to an interest that a person or a
collective can claim to have in terms of
access to a fish stock or to the harvest
from it.
[Neher et al. 1989:5, emphasis in original]
Thinking clearly about graduate students
and beans, teenage pizza parties, kids sharing slurpees. etc.
(Imagine a slide showing graduate students
performing an exercise with a bowl of dried
beans to simulate a) an open access fishery
and b) a fishery where catch is pre-assigned)
(this is not a fiction, it is a teaching tool being
used all over, only pre-assigned catch is often being interpreted as involving property rights)
Rules and rights are not the same thing.
Rights and incentives are not the same thing.
A simple tool:
Take an overall catch limit and divide it into individual assignments that each boat can fish where and when they want to (subject to whatever other rules apply).
A Failure to Distinguish the Tool from the Ideology
Tool: pre-assigned catch
Ideology: insistence that the tool must be private property and only “works” if it is
On the origin of “catch shares”
IFQs are not property rights-based fishing, they are catch share-based fishing… Once this conceptual breakthrough is realized, the tool (catch shares) can be liberated from the ideology (private property), and in the process open up the menu of available policy options. [Macinko and Bromley, 2002:29]
Why does this matter?
Policy options are being forced off the table by ideological dogmatism and conceptual
confusion spread to others.
There are many ways that pre-assigned catch could be used.
Actually, I would have to go much further in saying that I was shocked at learning the
degree to which the regulatory agenda in this area had already been captured by some
fisheries economists with an extreme "property rights" interpretation of harvesting quotas, which essentially preempts a serious consideration of [other standard economic tools] from the discussion table [Weitzman
2002:326 n.2].
Accountability…
Unintended Consequences?
Graphic by Dr.Jeppe Host
YouTube: The ‘T’ in Fish: reform of the EU CFP
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUzCcAFhqrs
There are no unintended consequences.
[if that is too strong for you: It is the intended consequences many of you should be focused on, not
the unintended ones…]
“The [snapper] fleet could rationalize by as much as 75-90%.... as the majority of the fleet lands less than 10k lbs in a year.”
[Redstone, 2007:7]
Despite all the words about design flexibility….
At every critical policy turn, market fundamentalism precludes a serious
conversation about goals.
And so in New England…..
“maybe we should consider some controls like they did in Alaska…“
but the answer from the very people bringing you “fisheries as investable
propositions” was: “No”
“Between 2009 and 2010, the sector’s groundfishlandings declined 61 percent and groundfish gross revenue declined by 52 percent. The Sector 10’s total revenue loss of $1,567,000 would have been significantly higher if not for a dramatic and unsustainable shift in effort by fishermen to non-groundfish species (lobster, dogfish, skate, etc). This shift in effort to non-groundfish species does not come without costs, and is likely to have negative conservation and management implications for other fisheries.”
“Evaluating the true impacts of this sector management program throughout the groundfishfishery is complicated because not all sectors are homogenous. We do, however, see evidence of a fisheries disaster caused by the transition to catch shares, with a disproportionate impact on small boat (30 – 50’) owners, which have been hampered by their limited range and limited access to quota.”
Stewardship results,
except when it doesn’t
Year TAC (million lbs) % change from prioryear
2007 8.51
2008 6.21 -27%
2009 5.02 -19%
2010 4.4 -12.4%
2011 2.33 -47%
International Pacific Halibut Commission (IPHC) TACs for IPHC Mgmt Area 2C
What are we talking about here?
ITQs are part of one of the great institutional changes of our times: the enclosure and privatization of the
common resources of the ocean. These are now mostly the exclusive property of the coastal states of
the world. [Neher et al. 1989:3]
This action [a proposed ITQ plan] conveys a share of a common property resource belonging jointly to the
people of the United States to private ownership
forever. . . [GMFMC n.d.]
What do you call it when you take something that belongs to someone else (with no compensation)?
Another, gentler (?) term:
Accumulation by dispossession.
For whom?
Or, what are we not talking about here?
Yesterday someone mentioned the need for attention to “loss of tenure rights
through forced evictions.”
Are we seriously talking about evicting peasants (through this wet enclosure
movement) to make room for Wall Street?
Graphic by Dr.Jeppe Host
Where do you want the people to go?
Did someone ask about the missing political economy?
How is any of this consistent with an interest in the Tenure Guidelines, the Small Scale Guidelines, Human Rights, Indigenous Rights…?
Is restoring feudalism your goal?
“Young people in New Zealand do not aspire to own quota, it is too expensive. Young people in NZ aspire to own boats and fish quota owned by the corporations (including Maori corporations).”
Let’s stop cheerleading and have a serious conversation
Public Policy Questions (currently off the table)
1) How do you best employ pre-assigned catch while meeting the trust obligations of public ownership?
2)Where do you want the rents to go (and why)?
3) Who Should be the Lessor?
4) Who do you want the relevant “stakeholders” and “communities to be?
Under either the public option or the privatization option you can:
*substantially reduce racing*shift incentives from maximizing catch to maximizing profit* achieve finer control over attainment of the overall TAC
Societies should debate whether they want public assets to remain public but the argument for privatization should be based on ideology, not bogus “science”
