A Co-management Solution To Fisheries Problems

As fisheries in other countries of the world, the Chinese fisheries are also suffering from lots of problems, including, inter alia, overcapitalization, overexploitation, and poor compliance of regulation by fishermen. In order to ensure its fisheries development in a sustainable way, the state's central government has initiated a series of actions, including most notably the seasonal and area closures, restriction on the national fleet size, and setting a target of "zero growth" of marine catches. To put those initiatives into practice, the government has spent a huge amount of human and financial resources. Yet, the effect turns out to be quite limited.How can we get out of this embracement? The crucial question for the success of any management scheme is what measures are needed to get fishermen voluntarily to advance their collective interests at the expense of their private ones. In other words, what could motivate fishermen to adhere loyally to the regulations? Two interrelated keywords here are "legitimacy" and "compliance"; i.e. to what extent fishermen willingly accept the regulations as appropriate and consistent with their persisting values. If fishermen find the regulatory scheme legitimate, there is more reason to believe that they will follow the rules.After a broad-brush review of the global fisheries management, we find that the international fisheries also facing a management crisis. This crisis has several aspects, and for each aspect scholars suggests their solutions. Among these solutions, the co-management approach is considered that it can effectively improve the "legitimacy" and "compliance" of regulations.Fisheries co-management is defined as an arrangement where responsibility for resource management is between the government and stakeholder groups (the main constitutes are user-groups). It's a set of dynamic process of creating new institutionalstructures, which determine how the fisheries administration and stakeholders cooperate. Co-management provides some sense of ownership to the fish resources, which makes user-groups far more responsible for obtaining long-term sustainability of the fish resources. The administration costs may increase in a co-management system, as the process may be rather time consuming, involving several interest groups, while the whole cost could be reduced for the more cost-efficient administration and enforcement process. Contrasted with the traditional top-down and "command-control" system, co-management has obvious advantages both in theory and in experience. It is argued that introducing the co-management idea into our fisheries management scheme is both necessary and feasible.The primary objective of this research, as the title of the dissertation suggested, is to provide a co-management solution to problems suffered by the Chinese fisheries. Theoretical issues associated with this objective that we try to identify are: What is the clause(s) underlying fishermen's poor compliance to regulation, and by what means can the compliance issue be effectively and efficiently improved?The dissertation is structured into four sections. To begin with, Section I explains the qualification and objectives of, methodology employed and limitations suffered by, this research as well as the structure of the dissertation. Next, we provide a review of key issues and events of science-based fisheries management from historical time to present, and some solutions for the recent management crisis are described in brief, too. Following on from this, the paper examines the theory and practice relating to fisheries co-management. Then, the paper discusses the necessity and feasibility of introducing a regime into our fisheries management system after a brief analysis of China's fisheries management system and its effectiveness and efficiency. The dissertation is ended with some suggestions on how to incorporated co-management regime into the existing management framework.