Moving beyond panaceas in fisheries governance

• Published in: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
• Main Authors: Young, Oran R., Webster, D. G., Cox, Michael E., Raakjaer, Jesper, Blaxekjaer, Lau Øfjord, Einarsson, N ́ıels, Virginia, Ross A., Acheson, James, Bromley, Daniel, Cardwell, Emma, Carothers, Courtney, Eythorsson, Einar, Howarth, Richard B., Jentoft, Svein, McCay, Bonnie J., McCormack, Fiona, Osherenko, Gail, Pinkerton, Evelyn, van Ginkel, Rob, Wilson, James A., Rivers, Louie Rivers, Wilson, Robyn S.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: NATL ACAD SCIENCES 2018
• Subjects: Science & Technology; Multidisciplinary Sciences; Science & Technology - Other Topics; governance; fisheries; panacea mindset; individual transferable quotas; institutional diagnostics; PROPERTY-RIGHTS; PACIFIC HALIBUT; ITQ MANAGEMENT; CATCH SHARES; BRISTOL BAY; NEW-ZEALAND; POWER; SUSTAINABILITY; PRIVATIZATION; ICELAND; New Zealand; Pacific; Iceland
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10289/15804; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1716545115

In fisheries management—as in environmental governance more generally—regulatory arrangements thatare thought to be helpful in some contexts frequently become panaceas or, in other words, simpleformulaic policy prescriptions believed to solve a given problem in a wide range of contexts, regardlessof their actual consequences. When this happens, management is likely to fail, and negative side effectsare common. We focus on the case of individual transferable quotas to explore the panacea mindset, a setof factors that promote the spread and persistence of panaceas. These include conceptual narratives thatmake easy answers like panaceas seem plausible, power disconnects that create vested interests in pan-aceas, and heuristics and biases that prevent people from accurately assessing panaceas. Analysts havesuggested many approaches to avoiding panaceas, but most fail to conquer the underlying panaceamindset. Here, we suggest the codevelopment of an institutional diagnostics toolkit to distill the vastamount of information on fisheries governance into an easily accessible, open, on-line database of check-lists, case studies, and related resources. Toolkits like this could be used in many governance settings tochallenge users’understandings of a policy’s impacts and help them develop solutions better tailored totheir particular context. They would not replace the more comprehensive approaches found in the liter-ature but would rather be an intermediate step away from the problem of panaceas.