Effects of experience with access regimes on stewardship behaviors of small-scale fishers

Date

2021

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Article

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Abstract

Governance regimes that assign exclusive access to support collective action are increas- ingly promoted to manage common-pool resources under the premise that they foster environmental stewardship. However, experimental evidence linked to existing policies that support this premise is lacking. Overlapping access policies in small-scale fisheries provide a unique opportunity to test the effects of access regimes on users’ stewardship behaviors. We performed a lab-in-the-field experiment to assess how fishers’ previous experience with access regimes relates to compliance and peer enforcement (n = 120). Fishers’ compliance and peer-enforcement decisions were compared in a common-pool-resource game. Treatments differed in framing to represent exclusive access and pseudo-open access regimes, both of which fishers face in real life. To contrast behavior in the game with real-life observations, we compared fishers’ associations that have shown relatively high and low management performance under exclusive access policies. Compliance and peer enforcement were higher under the exclusive access treatment than under the pseudo-open access treatment only for fishers’ associations with high management performance in real life. Behaviors in the game reflected differences between associations in real life. Our results support previous research on ocean governance by experimentally assessing the role of access regimes in determining users’ stewardship and suggest potential mechanisms for stewardship internalization.

Description

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Citation

Rivera-Hechem MI., et al. Effects of experience with access regimes on stewardship behaviors of small-scale fishers. Conservation Biology. 2021;1−10.

Keywords

Collective action, Environmental stewardship, External validity, Lab-in-the-field experiment, Small-scale fisheries, Territorial user rights for fisheries

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