Evelyn Pinkerton

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Full) at Simon Fraser University

The province of British Columbia, Canada, began its community forests (CF) program by permitting a range of governance structures, both to allow flexibility and to discover the most appropriate structures for this new forestry tenure. The majority of municipalities participating in this program elected to hold their CF tenure through a separate cor...

This introduction to the special feature describes the development and application of a “full-spectrum sustainability” evaluation framework that emerged from a transdisciplinary research process. The framework and corresponding case studies described in this paper originated in the work of a Canadian Fisheries Research Network project that sought t...

"Individual transferable quotas (ITQs) have been promoted as a management approach to address many of the economic and conservation challenges encountered in fisheries. ITQs are expected to improve fishery outcomes based on assumptions about who owns the quota, how ownership is transferred and how ownership incentivizes stewardship. Changes in the ow...

Individual transferable quotas (ITQs) have been widely promoted as a means to improve the conservation and economic outcomes of fisheries by enabling the transfer of quota access privileges to the most efficient operators who in turn have a strong financial incentive to safeguard the long-term sustainability of the fishery. The British Columbia Pac...

Rural and resource-based coastal communities in British Columbia (BC) are facing a number of pressing challenges that are affecting the holistic health and well-being of local people. The challenges facing coastal communities include being disconnected from decision-making process, a changing climate, rapidly evolving ecosystems, increasing polluti...

The economically and culturally important Pacific halibut fishery in British Columbia, Canada, managed as an individual transferable quota fishery since 1993, has frequently been held up as an example of management best practices. This narrative of success has continued despite repeated warnings that there are serious problems with the fishery, inc...

The reintroduction of a previously extirpated predator can engender conflict when the reintroduced species depletes customary fisheries to which indigenous communities have constitutionally protected rights. In the case of sea otter (Enhydra lutris) recovery on the west coast of North America, not only is Canada’s Species at Risk Act in conflict wi...

Around the globe, small-scale fishers are systematically excluded from access to fish or the benefits of fishing, yet in many cases they persist. This chapter considers key strategies used by small-scale fishers’ organizations, as well as some national or sub-national governments which support them, to maintain their access in the neoliberalizing w...

When the Government of British Columbia (BC) introduced the Community Forest Agreement Program in 1998, it permitted a range of governance structures to allow flexibility and to learn which structures might be most appropriate for this new form of forest tenure. One structure that became fairly common was collaboration between Indigenous and non-In...

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,...

Many fisheries managers and neoliberal fisheries economists promote Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs) as a solution to the race for fish which can cause rent dissipation under competitive quota or open access fisheries. These actors consider the Canadian Pacific halibut ITQ fishery an example of successful achievement of these objectives. Howev...

Fisheries sustainability is recognized to have four pillars: ecological, economic, social (including cultural) and institutional (or governance). Although international agreements, and legislation in many jurisdictions, call for implementation of all four pillars of sustainability, the social, economic and institutional aspects (i.e., the “human di...

An interdisciplinary team of academics and representatives of fishing fleets and government collaborated to study the emerging requirements for sustainability in Canada’s fisheries. Fisheries assessment and management has focused on biological productivity with insufficient consideration of social (including cultural), economic, and institutional (...

Access, defined as the ability to use and benefit from available marine resources or areas of the ocean or coast, is important for the well-being and sustainability of coastal communities. In Canada, access to marine resources and ocean spaces is a significant issue for many coastal and Indigenous communities due to intensifying activity and compet...

This paper reviews the major themes and contributions of this Special Issue in light of a broader social science literature on how to conceptualize small-scale fisheries, the role of the state in facilitating or limiting neoliberalism, and the failure of neoliberal policies to improve conservation. It concludes with a look at ways in which neoliber...

Under what conditions can an aboriginal fishing community keep a commercial fishery closed because of persistent low stock abundance when the federal government insists on opening it to commercial fishing? This paper explores a decades long effort by the Haida Nation to protect local herring stocks on Haida Gwaii through a precautionary approach to...

What have been the moral values and practices allowing equitable economic opportunities and a sense of fairness in North American small-scale fisheries? How have these “moral economies” been affected by neoliberal policies with their emphasis on efficiency, rational self-interest, and wealth accumulation? Focusing especially on the salmon and halib...

This paper reviews the ways in which policies of enclosure, privatization, and deregulation have unfolded in several regions of North America and examines the consequences they have had for small-scale fisheries in practice. This introductory essay provides a brief overview of the history of neoliberal thought, discusses some of the key ways it has...

In Brazil, the recognition that fisheries encompass both natural ecosystems and human well-being has increased, but initiatives are focused largely on highly-valued species, ignoring socially relevant resources such as Venus clams (Anomalocardia brasiliana). We investigate two initiatives involving comanagement of Venus clams in the past two decade...

There is widespread debate about the best strategies to provide local benefits in forest management. We evaluate recent policy changes in British Columbia, Canada, focussing on attempts to create local benefits from public forests through a community forestry program and broad policy changes in 2003 that removed obligations of tenure holders to pro...

Aboriginal and nonaboriginal fishing-dependent communities on the coast of British Columbia, Canada, having lost traditional fisheries management institutions along with significant fishing opportunity, are in the process of rebuilding local and regional institutions to allow their survival. Sometimes, the rebuilding effort involves the creation of...

Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs), also called “catch shares”, have been broadly adopted in the last two decades, at the same time that concerns about their equity and effectiveness in delivering the predicted outcomes have increased. This paper documents how an alternative fishermen-designed and operated system of spreading fishing effort to a...

We compared the resilience to economic shocks-such as the downturn of the U. S. housing market-of commodity sawmills, which tend to be large, and value-added specialty sawmills, which tend to be small or medium in size, that are located in one region of the province of British Columbia, Canada, as measured by their average days in operation over th...

Successful fish habitat protection occurs in areas of urban/industrial development when responsible citizens in rural watersheds can produce and implement local water quality plans binding on all agencies. In 1985, legislation in the state of Washington, USA, authorized a central planning agency — the Puget Sound Water Quality Authority — to initia...

This paper considers socio-political, ecological, and economic dimensions of local efforts to negotiate local control over state-sponsored development of clam aquaculture in one region of British Columbia, Canada. Aquaculture is conceptualized as a type of cadastralization, following James Scott's characterization of state efforts to make the produ...

This short communication is, in part, a response to the Bruce Turris' rejoinder (Marine Policy...2010) to Pinkerton et al., The elephant in the room: The hidden costs of leasing individual transferable fishing quotas (Marine Policy, July 2009). In responding to this article on the unacknowledged problems of unregulated and even unrecorded leasing o...

Intertidal clam fisheries seem ideal candidates for the devolution of management authority from government to local stakeholders. In St. Mary's Bay, Nova Scotia, a private firm recently applied for a 10-year renewal of a large (1,627 ha) lease for quahog clam aquaculture. This case study examines the challenges of implementing community-based natur...

Ecosystem stewardship is an action-oriented framework intended to foster the social-ecological sustainability of a rapidly changing planet. Recent developments identify three strategies that make optimal use of current understanding in an environment of inevitable uncertainty and abrupt change: reducing the magnitude of, and exposure and sensitivit...

Introduction – partnerships solve problems, but are little known by managersPartnerships of small and large scopePartnerships of small and large scalePartnerships with dual or multiple partiesPartnerships with different levels of community empowerment: accountabilityUnusual partnerships solving particular equity problems: linking offshore fisheries...

Despite the increasingly positive reviews of individual transferable quotas (ITQs), few studies have considered how quota leasing activities can reduce the economic benefits to society and to fishermen operating under the ITQ fisheries system. This analysis reveals negative economic impacts of ITQs previously overlooked by examining the extent of q...

"Fishers often rely on their social capital to cope with resource fluctuations by sharing information on the abundance and location of fish. Drawing on research in seven coastal fishing communities in Loreto, Baja California Sur, Mexico, we examine the effect of resource scarcity on the bonding, bridging, and linking social-capital patterns of fish...

Building trust through collaboration, institutional development, and social learning enhances efforts to foster ecosystem management and resolve multi-scale society-environment dilemmas. One emerging approach aimed at addressing these dilemmas is adaptive co-management. This method draws explicit attention to the learning ( experiential and experim...

Accelerated global changes in climate, environment, and social–ecological systems demand a transformation in human perceptions of our place in nature and patterns of resource use. The biology and culture of Homo sapiens evolved for about 95% of our species’ history in hunting-and-gathering societies before the emergence of settled agriculture. We h...

Community contributions to fisheries management are important to the sustainability of coastal ecosystems, including the people who most depend on fisheries. A majority of the world’s population lives along coastlines. People are an integral component of coastal marine systems because of what they do to either conserve or damage marine resources. J...

How can legitimate local management be created in a situation initially lacking respect for both local authority and federal government regulations? This question is addressed through examination of the 18-year history of what became an effective local regulatory regime for clams in an aboriginal community in British Columbia, Canada. After conside...

"As neoliberalism continues to influence environmental governance, it affects notions about the appropriate level of community involvement in resource management. Under more recent iterations, hybrid forms of governance are emphasized, including government-civil society partnerships and approaches geared towards harnessing the strengths of local co...

Building trust through collaboration, institutional development, and social learning enhances efforts to foster ecosystem management and resolve multi-scale society–environment dilemmas. One emerging approach aimed at addressing these dilemmas is adaptive co-management. This method draws explicit attention to the learning (experiential and experime...

There is compelling evidence that participatory governance is crucial for contending with complex problems of managing for multiple values and outcomes to achieve ecological sustainability and economic development. Canada's Oceans Act, and federal oceans policy provide a strong basis for the participatory governance and community-based management o...

"In January 2005, I and another evaluation team member,' Anita Bedo, delivered an evaluation of a three-year pilot initiative in adaptive co-management to the co-managing body, the West Coast Vancouver Island Aquatic Management Board (AMB).' This body is attempting to move towards integrated ecosystem-based management of a coastal area covering som...

The term ‘fisheries co-management’ has now been so broadly used in applied settings and in social science that it risks losing important aspects of its original thrust. In addition, as social science thinking about management in general has evolved over the last two decades, we have all refined and enriched the way we see this concept. For the conc...

"The term 'fisheries co-management' has now been so broadly used in applied settings and in social science that it risks losing important aspects of its original thrust. In addition, as social science thinking about management in general has evolved over the last two decades, we have all refined and enriched the way we see this concept. For the con...

"Ten years of research and efforts to implement co-management in British Columbia fisheries have demonstrated that we lack neither good models nor the political will in communities to design and test local and regional institutions for successful involvement in various aspects of management. The barriers lie rather in the distrust and resistance of...

Canadian fisheries in the context of climate change.

"This report is a response to three broad issues facing British Columbia fisheries in the 1990s and beyond. It is intended to explore some creative ways for dealing with these issues, and to analyze some of the costs and benefits of doing so."

"The theory and practice of community-based self-management and government/community co-management is examined in terms of the potential of these management systems to address some of the major biological, economic, and political problems of the salmon fishery of British Columbia, Canada. Particular attention is given to government/multi-party arra...

Aquaculture developments often create policy conflicts with established fisheries when the two are not coordinated through a common planning framework. The state of Alaska and community-based, fisher-led salmon aquaculture associations have been unusually successful at coordinating, through cooperative management, the traditional salmon capture fis...

"In 1991, a model forest practices act that would radically transform methods of forest management in British Columbia was proposed by a coalition of First Nations, trade unions, environmentalists and small businesses. If implemented, the Tin Wis Forest Stewardship Act would see the province of British Columbia give a prominent forest management ro...

"In many cases the management of certain common property natural resources has been successfully shared between government agencies and groups claiming co-management rights. This analysis adds to existing middle-range theoretical propositions about how such co-management arrangements develop, and specifically how groups overcome barriers to co-mana...

"This study of innovations in fisheries management and organization democracy focuses both on substantive management improvements sought by treaty tribes in western Washington, USA, and on the mechanisms through which tribes share decision-making with one another, with all their members, and with state agencies. The fisheries management system of t...

"Accounts of complex multi-party cooperation in some social sciences focus on the political and structural dimensions, neglecting human relational and cultural aspects of cooperation. Conversely, anthropological analyses which focus on the latter aspects often minimize the former. Overall, few researchers consider the dynamics of actors shifting am...

"This report documents the first stages of a multi-party collaborative watershed management pilot project initiated by the Shuswap Nation in their territory in southeastern British Columbia. The pilot project is examined in the context of province-wide fisheries conflicts, because it is an important attempt to create a situation in which these conf...