Institutions for sustainable fisheries governance - the case of the commercial Peruvian anchovy fishery

Abstract

Fisheries governance is about influencing multiple actors decisions and behaviours relative to an ocean area and the resources contained therein. How these behaviours and decisions are influenced is a matter of institutions. This research uses the Peruvian anchovy fishery as a case study. Landings of Peruvian anchovy represent almost 10 % of the worlds total fishery landings. Following the well known collapse of the anchovy fishery at the start of the 1970s, landings have recovered and have been sustained over the last two decades at around six to nine million tonnes per year. Despite this evidence of sustainability, key institutional requirements that are nowadays strongly recommended to achieve sustainable fisheries are absent in this fishery. These missing requirements for sustainability include for instance individual fishing quota shares, decentralized bottom-up management and eco-labelling. In order to explore the institutional setting of this sustainable fishery, this study adopts a broad institutional approach that considers a range of institutions, including those mentioned above and others that have rarely been considered by fisheries research. The first article of this research looks at the role and evolution of formal fisheries institutions and their relation to sustainability. Results show that General Fisheries Acts in Peru were enacted independently of trends in anchovy landings. The three Peruvian Fisheries Acts were a reflection of broader national socio-political changes and were enacted mainly to define the role of the state and private investment and to delimit foreign involvement in the fishery industry. The base-level management to deal with landings was left to secondary legislation. To guarantee stable landings, this secondary legislation operates adaptively, in response to environmental and ecological dynamics. Fisheries laws play an important role in defining access rights according to local, economic and political policies and function as an umbrella for secondary legislation and other norms to evolve towards sustainability. The second article deals with informal institutions and the connection between sustainability and adaptation to environmental variability and climate change. As shown in this article, the sustainability of the Peruvian fishery relies heavily on institutions developed to cope with environmental change. A set of eight adaptive strategies are described. These included: decentralized installation of anchovy processing factories; simultaneous ownership of fishing fleet and processing factories (vertical integration); use of low-cost unloading facilities; opportunistic utilization of invading fish populations; low cost intensive monitoring; rapid responses and flexible management; reduction of price uncertainty by restricting supply of anchovy products (fishmeal) to match market demand; and decoupling of fishmeal prices from those of other substitute commodities. These coping strategies provide an example of how the fisheries sector and central government can act positively to reduce undesirable impacts of environmental variability and change. The third article deals with fish as a common pool resource (CPR). This article considers the extent to which institutional characteristics of the Peruvian fishery conform to design principles which are considered prerequisites for long-term successful community-based CPR. This study finds that clearly defined resource boundaries, monitoring rule enforcement and conflict resolution mechanisms among users and management authorities supported the transition towards sustainability. On the other hand, clearly defined user boundaries, collective choice arrangements and nested enterprises were in this case not required to achieve sustainability. The article analyses the strengths and limitations of current and past institutional arrangements in the Peruvian anchovy fishery. It comments on the extent to which design principles developed in local CPR systems are transferable to a national scale.