In fisheries management-as in environmental governance more generally-regulatory arrangements that are thought to be helpful in some contexts frequently become panaceas or, in other words, simple formulaic policy prescriptions believed to solve a given problem in a wide range of contexts, regardless of their actual consequences. When this happens, management is likely to fail, and negative side effects are common. We focus on the case of individual transferable quotas to explore the panacea mindset, a set of factors that promote the spread and persistence of panaceas. These include conceptual narratives that make easy answers like panaceas seem plausible, power disconnects that create vested interests in panaceas, and heuristics and biases that prevent people from accurately assessing panaceas. Analysts have suggested many approaches to avoiding panaceas, but most fail to conquer the underlying panacea mindset. Here, we suggest the codevelopment of an institutional diagnostics toolkit to distill the vast amount of information on fisheries governance into an easily accessible, open, on-line database of checklists, case studies, and related resources. Toolkits like this could be used in many governance settings to challenge users' understandings of a policy's impacts and help them develop solutions better tailored to their particular context. They would not replace the more comprehensive approaches found in the literature but would rather be an intermediate step away from the problem of panaceas.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, several maritime anthropologists and sociologists pointed out that for a number of economic, social and psychological reasons, the performance of commercial fishing firms based on kin-based capital and labour was highly adaptive. For this reason, most crews in the North Atlantic area seemed to be organized around a core of agnatic relatives with women playing important shore-based roles. As of the early 1990s, the attention of anthropologists and sociologists shifted away from 'classical' themes such as the social organization of fishing to issues of policy and management, particularly property rights regimes and rights-based fishing. Consequently, the topic of kin and family in the fisheries disappeared into the background. Nonetheless, it would appear that family firms are still predominant in the fisheries. In this paper, I will analyze their logic and dynamic in conditions of ecological, economic and political uncertainty, using ethnographic material from research in Dutch fishing communities on the island of Texel. Considerable attention will be devoted to the issue of what rights-based management regimes have meant for the social organization of and kin involvement in fishing firms.
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