2. Lessons from Community-Based Resource Management 3. Migratory Marine Resources as a Special Challenge to Commons Theory

• Main Authors: Edited Nobuhiro Kishigami, James M. Savelle, Fikret Berkes
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Canada; Chisasibi; Indian; Subarctic; James Bay
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.470.9347; http://www.umanitoba.ca/institutes/natural_resources/canadaresearchchair/Berkes 2005 commons.05.pdf

I carried out my first study of community-based resource management in the mid-1970s in the Cree Indian village of Chisasibi, James Bay, in eastern subarctic Canada. As a recent science PhD, I had no training to appreciate local resource management institutions and traditional knowledge. Worse, as a member of a generation of students under the influence of the “tragedy of the commons ” 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 fishery [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 of government regulations. Yet, as it turned out, there was indeed a system, and the fishers were self-organized and self-managed, unlike the “tragedy of the commons ” [BERKES 1999, chapter 7, summarizes some ten years of work with this fishery]. The “tragedy of the commons ” is often a starting point in commons discussions. Until the 1980s, it was the principal way in which commons were considered. Hardin [1968] used the