Managing common pool resources: A coevolutionary environmental history of the Lake Michigan fishery

A coevolutionary environmental history was constructed to document the property regimes governing the Lake Michigan fishery from 800 A.D. to 1985. Historical and contemporary evidence indicates that various property regimes have governed this fishery. These governance structures correlate to the typology of property regimes identified in the common property literature and include: communal, state management, open access, and private property. The Lake Michigan fishery provides a unique opportunity to examine the evolution of common property regimes governing this remarkable common pool resource (CPR).; This study employed a case study approach, utilizing the Lake Michigan fishery, to build an historical contextual understanding of the evolution of property regimes governing the fishery. To provide environmental and social context, I employed Norgaard's (1994) coevolutionary framework. This framework provided a strategy for examining how the model's five components, values, technology, social organization, environment, and knowledge, shaped the conditions in which property regimes functioned and of which property regimes were a part. I employed a document analysis approach of historical and contemporary publications to identify the characteristics of each of the framework components over the four property regimes operating on Lake Michigan during my study.; This coevolutionary historical analysis illuminates the ways property regimes are shaped by dynamic social and environmental processes and by preceding regimes. Even as each component of the coevolutionary framework provided insight on fishery governance for each era, greater understanding emerged when I examined the interactions among the components.; By examining the history of the Lake Michigan fishery across property regimes, the enduring theme of open access to fishery resources emerged. Despite calls from fishery managers and others, the fishery essentially remained unregulated until its “collapse” in the 1960s. This study reveals that governance structures and the actions and policies that emerged from them were influenced by historical and contextual elements associated with the fishery, a common pool resource. Additional research is needed to identify and assess current innovative governance structures for managing multi jurisdictional, multi-user, and multi-regime common pool resources.