Bargaining, uncertainty and property rights in North Atlantic fisheries.

摘要

Garrett Hardin's "tragedy of the commons" metaphor is commonly invoked to account for the unfortunate state of world fisheries. But the world's oceans are no longer a global commons and have not been so for the past two decades. Open-access regimes have persisted within many exclusive economic zones (EEZs) during this time, but coastal states' authority to regulate domestic fisheries has existed for more than a generation. Faced with the prospect of Hardin's tragedy, coastal states have had more than twenty years to devise institutional constraints that would prevent it. This dissertation asserts that the dismal experience with EEZs is in large part attributable to distributive bargaining problems that arose within coastal states in the wake of EEZ extension. More importantly, the dissertation argues that the interaction of actor heterogeneity and rule uncertainty can exacerbate these problems. The effects of these factors are reflected in crude forms of property rights that are often observed in the early stages of institutional design. Finally, the dissertation demonstrates how the variety of institutional designs and paths of institutional development that are observed in Iceland, Norway, Atlantic Canada and the New England region of the United States result from different configurations of political and economic structure within each case. Though the empirical discussion is focused upon property rights in fisheries, the theoretical discussion of bargaining under uncertainty has widespread application across comparative and international politics. The methodological approach adopted in this study uses an empirical puzzle and/or policy dilemma as a point of departure for theoretical abstraction. Abstraction allows for the specification of explicit, theoretically informed lines of reasoning that can be transformed into research hypotheses. These hypotheses are then operationalized and evaluated against empirical evidence. The evidence takes the form of government reports, public hearings documents, both public and internal industry documents and press reports, interview transcripts from secondary sources, and interviews and surveys conducted by the author. While some descriptive statistics are presented, the analysis is largely qualitative and presented in the form of a narrative.