Impacts of fishery policy on the distribution of access and community benefits

This paper provides an illustration of how fishery policies, particularly relating to transferability of licenses and quota holdings, can alter the distribution of fishery access, rights and benefits across fishing communities. Such distributional changes have consequences, but these are rarely made explicit within management, and there is too often a lack of effort to predict, monitor or mitigate those consequences. As seen in this paper, the lack of attention to distributional impacts can produce possibly-unintended but certainly highly negative impacts on some fishing communities. In particular, a temporal analysis of the distribution of access and benefits for lobster, groundfish and herring fisheries in part of the Atlantic region of Canada shows how a specific community (Grand Manan) lost fishery access and benefits, linked to policy changes over a four-decade time period. The resulting community-level impacts, including a decline in local prosperity, and a loss of diversity and resilience in the local economy, were largely untracked by government. This experience demonstrates the importance of establishing and monitoring explicit objectives related to community viability and wellbeing, within fishery management and policy processes. Greater attention to the distributional consequences of fisheries policies (and regulations) can contribute to policy that better balances multiple management objectives and trade-offs among these, and that can better consider concerns regarding fairness and equity.