Finding Order Amid Complex Small-Scale Fisheries Self-Governance Arrangements

Small-scale fisheries are distributed in isolated, rural coastal areas around the globe, often far away from the control of the State. As such they are a quintessential example of self-governance. Our aim is to find order in the overwhelming institutional diversity we see in small-scale fisheries around the world. To do this in this paper we develop some theoretical tools we argue are key to organize ideas and build and test theory about self-governance in the context of small-scale fisheries. We argue that the first step is to start by making clear which is the basic set of action situations most common in fishing. What are the basic set of action situations that make up what we define as “small-scale fisheries”? We argue they are a set of regularized relations of production that start by accessing capital and other means of production and property-rights to go harvesting and end with the discount of costs of fishing to determine the fisher’s profit. In continuing this relation of production into the future fishers and fishbuyers seek certain characteristics in one another. We investigated what characteristics do they seek in one another to give meaning to the concept of micro-institutional arrangements in fishing. We then investigated the role of micro-institutions in the context of the two dominant types of self-governance around the world: patron-client relationships and fishing cooperatives. We conclude with the identification of different patterns of behavior among the two different forms of self-governance in the case studies we investigated. It remains to be investigated in the future whether these patterns are generalizable or unique.