3. Migratory Marine Resources as a Special Challenge to Commons Theory

• Main Authors: Nobuhiro Kishigami, James M. Savelle, Fikret Berkes, I Commonsconceptandtheory
• 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=10.1.1.627.5958; http://ir.minpaku.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/10502/1077/1/SES67_002.pdf

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 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 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 commons " [BERKEs 1999, chapter 7, sumniarizes some ten years ofwork with this fishery]. The "tragedy ofthe 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