Professor of Natural Resources, Canadian Research Chair, University of Manitoba
A critical aspect of marine overharvesting involves mobile resource exploiters and buyers (”roving bandits”) who can deplete stocks faster than regulatory agencies can respond. Roving banditry is different from the classical ”tragedy of the commons” in that it reflects a new dynamic that has arisen in the globalized world: markets for new marine products can develop so rapidly that the speed of resouce exploitation overwhelms the ability of local and national institutions to respond. This dynamic typically results in sequential exploitation: the spatially expanding depletion of harvested species over time, in which the serial depletions of local stocks are masked by ever-expanding geographic expansion of the harvest area. We have documented such a pattern for sea urchins harvested for the global sushi trade.
Roving bandits and sequential exploitation are not isolated phenomena but symptoms of globalization characterized by rapid, systemic change and the collapse of space and time scales. This is commons as complexity. Global and regional agencies are too clumsy to monitor at the relevant scale and react in a timely fashion; local institutions are often overwhelmed by surprise. The problem must be addressed at multiple scales using multiple tools. But solutions ultimately depend on changed behaviour at the local level, building conserving feedback to create stewardship incentives and adaptive governance. These include establishing community property rights (and in some cases individual rights); fostering co-management regimes that can learn from experience (adaptive co-management); using the local and traditional knowledge of fishers; building community-based monitoring; and developing multi-level governance institutions that can learn and innovate.
Fikret Berkes is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Manitoba, Natural Resources Institute, and the Canada Research Chair in Community-Based Resource Management. Fikret works at the interface of natural and social sciences and studies commons, co-management, resilience and traditional ecological knowledge. He has devoted most of his professional career to investigating the relations between societies and their resources, in particular, examining the conditions under which the "Tragedy of the Commons" may be avoided. Fikret has many publications include Navigating Social-Ecological Systems (2003), Managing Small-Scale Fisheries (2001) and Sacred Ecology (1999). Fikret earned his PhD in Marine Sciences at McGill University, Montreal, Canada.