Commons Theory for Marine Resource Management in a Complex World

1. COMMONS CONCEPT AND THEORY I carried out my first study ofcommunity-based resource management in the mid-1970s in the Cree Indian village of Chisasibi, James Bay, in eastern subarctic Canada. As a recent science Phl]), I had no training to appreciate local resource management institutions and traditional knowledge. Worse, as a member ofa generation ofstudents under the influence ofthe tragedy of the concept, I was predisposed to believing that resources had to be protected from the users by government resource managers and appropriately trained scientists. This belief was shaken somewhat by the results of my studies of Cree fishers and their productive and orderly fishgry [BERKEs 1977]. This was a subsistence fishery, with no commercial component, carried out in the coastal waters of James Bay. There were no apparent rules or regulations in its conduct. As an indigenous subsistence fishery, it operated outside the sphere ofgovernment regulations. Yet, as it turned cyut, there was indeed a system, and the fishers were selforganized and selfimanaged, unlike the tragedy ofthe [BERKEs 1999, chapter 7, sumniarizes some ten years ofwork with this fishery]. The tragedy ofthe is often a starting point in commons discussions. Until the 1980s, it was the principal in which commons were considered. Hardin [1968] used the example of an imaginary pasture in Medieval England to which cattle herders have free and open access (i.e. a commons). Each herder receives a direct benefit (say +1) from adding one more. animal to graze in the pasture, whereas the costs of degrading the pasture are shared by all (a fraction of-1). Thus, each herder has the incentive to put as many cattle on the pasture as he can. Putting more animals on the pasture is the economically rational choice; yet everyone exercising their rational choice leads to the degradation ofthe pasture-hence the tragedy. The James Bay. Cree fishery did not fit this model at all. The fishers were able to decide among themselves on the rules of conduct of the fishery, and were able to persuade more or less everyone to fbllow those The rules were not written down, and the Cree themselves did not think ofthem as rules. It was simply the way things were done. This locally designed fishing system was quite different from biological management systems generally applicable

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