Attitudes of Trawl Vessel Captains about Work, Resource Use, and Fishery Management

—The fisheries literature embodies critical assumptions about fisherman attitudes and motivations. Common assumptions are that populations of fishermen are homogeneous in motivation and decision making and that they behave in a myopic fashion, ignoring the effects of their fishing activities on the fishery resource. The results of a survey of trawl vessel captains challenge these assumptions. We document a heterogeneous population of captains who hold a diverse set of views toward work, risk, and the ocean environment. We discuss the implications of these survey results for the design and implementation of fishery regulations, and for the rationalization of fisheries. We note the potential costs of misrepresenting fishermen in models of fishery resource use. Implicit in models of open-access fisheries are assumptions about the behavior of resource users. Basic assumptions of Gordon's (1954) model of a common-property fishery and Hardin's later (1968) model of common-property resources are that resource users are homogeneous in motivation and decision making, and operate without an appreciation for either long-term resource availability or the aggregate effect of individual resource use activities. Although both Gordon and Hardin refer to common-property resources, they are more accurately describing commons with unregulated access, or what are generally called open-access resources. Entry to and exit from such resources are assumed to be free. The homogeneity assumption is also implicit in the behavioral determinism of the "tragedy of the commons" model of fisheries. This model dictates that because property rights to fish are based on capture, fishermen behave in a single-minded, myopic fashion, ignoring both the long-term and the collective effects of their fishing effort. Even under various degrees of regulation, open-access fisheries are assumed to be trapped in a remorseless tragedy in which fishermen pursue their goal to maximize short-term profits to the detriment of long-term sustainability. Strengthening the argument for the tragedy model is the fact that most open-access fisheries in industrialized economies have evolved to a current state of heavy capitalization, tightened resource constraints, and widened overlaps between fishing activities. Management entities are spending increasing amounts of time developing regulations directed at controlling the human impact on fish stocks. A substantial amount of both theoretical and applied fishery economics literature adopts the behavioral assumptions of the Gordon and Hardin models of common-property resources in analyzing the efficacy of fishery regulatory techniques. At the same time, a growing body of literature is calling into question the accuracy of the assumptions regarding fishermen's behavior and the determinism of the commons. The diversity of use arrangements in open-access fisheries worldwide is now well documented (National Research Council 1986; McCay and Acheson 1987; Berkes 1989; McGoodwin 1990). In addition, the conditions under which even private ownership may not provide the proper incentive structure for efficient resource use have been detailed (Scott 1955; Clark 1973). The assumption of free entry and exit has been shown not to hold for fisheries with strong cultural and ethnic identification (Anderson and Wadel 1972; Acheson 1975; Terkla et al. 1988). Gatewood and McCay (1990) demonstrated heterogeneity among commercial fishermen in the degree of job satisfaction realized in different New Jersey fisheries. Wilson (1990) noted the array of contextual institutional factors that should be reflected in "efficiency" goals for a particular fishery. The importance of appropriate representations of fisherman behavior to the design of efficient fishery regulations has also been noted (Wilen 1979).