EAPSI: Understanding how customary fishing reserves affect commercial fishing

Bodwitch Hekia E, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

Ocean sustainability initiatives include both market-based and spatial management strategies, but we have yet to understand what happens when these approaches overlap. This project will investigate the relationship between New Zealand's commercial fishing industry, governed by a tradable quota system, and an indigenous Maori community's governance of a spatially defined marine area, in which commercial fishing is prohibited. In 2004, the Ngai Tahu tribe established the nation's largest customary fishing reserve off Stewart Island to promote fish species' development. Commercial industry representatives, however, argue the reserve's ban on commercial fishing conflicts with the market-based incentives for sustainable fishing practices embedded in the nation's quota system. This project will map changes in commercial fishing data against customary management practices to examine how quota markets are affected by spatial restrictions on commercial fishing. This research will be conducted in collaboration with Dr. Brad Coombes at the University of Auckland, in New Zealand, who is a noted expert on indigenous resource management. The tensions between commercial and customary fishing policies in New Zealand speak to broader concerns regarding the recognition of indigenous rights through market-based solutions to social and environmental problems, exemplified in fisheries quota management systems and carbon cap-and-trade programs. The dynamics of Maori fishery governance are particularly important to examine because Maori tribes are also major players in the commercial fishing industry, owning substantial amounts of fishing quota. This investigation of Maori fisheries management strategies will, therefore, trouble the durability of dichotomies between customary versus commercial interests, and traditional versus modern natural resource management practices. In doing so, this research will broaden our understanding of the ways access to and benefits from marine resources may be more equitably distributed to indigenous and non-indigenous fisheries stakeholders. This NSF EAPSI award is funded in collaboration with the Royal Society of New Zealand.