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Transfer Patterns in Alaskan Limited Entry Fisheries. Final report prepared for the Limited Entry Study Group of the Alaska State Legislature. Juneau, AK. 153 pp.
... Barriers to entry are especially pertinent to the current generation of fishermen trying to make a successful livelihood from fishing, but uncertainty remains about the knock-on effects of graying trends on future generations of fishermen (and vice versa), namely today's youth living in coastal communities. For example, access rights and rights holders have migrated away from rural fishery-dependent communities over the past 40 years, restricting local access to fishing opportunities and weakening the social ties between fishing and the community (Carothers 2015;Langdon 1980;Knapp 2011;Gho and Farrington 2017;Donkersloot and Menzies 2015;Donkersloot 2010). These ties have been further threatened by commodity market instability and low fish prices, years of low fish abundance, and in some regions disasters like the Exxon-Valdez oil spill and threats like the development of large-scale mining projects (Braund 2017;Hébert 2015;Donkersloot 2007;Fall et al. 2006). ...
... Parameter estimates were averaged according to methods by Burnham and Anderson (2002), modified for design-based survey data using methods by Lumley and Scott (2015) Parameter since the privatization of access in many Alaskan fisheries in the mid-1970s (state limited entry program) and again in the mid-1990s (federal IFQ program). As families sold fishing rights during the initial period of privatization or moved away from their communities, an important opportunity to expose future generations of their family to fishing was lost, in many cases permanently (Apgar-Kurtz 2015;Langdon 1980;Reedy-Maschner 2007;Carothers 2008). In other cases, families were never engaged in fishing. ...
The original version of this article unfortunately contained mistakes. Please see the description below. 1. Co-author Danielle Ringer’s affiliation and address are: University of Alaska Fairbanks, College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences, Kodiak Seafood Marine Science Center, 118 Trident Way, Kodiak AK 99615.
... Barriers to entry are especially pertinent to the current generation of fishermen trying to make a successful livelihood from fishing, but uncertainty remains about the knock-on effects of graying trends on future generations of fishermen (and vice versa), namely today's youth living in coastal communities. For example, access rights and rights holders have migrated away from rural fishery-dependent communities over the past 40 years, restricting local access to fishing opportunities and weakening the social ties between fishing and the community (Carothers 2015;Langdon 1980;Knapp 2011;Gho and Farrington 2017;Donkersloot and Menzies 2015;Donkersloot 2010). These ties have been further threatened by commodity market instability and low fish prices, years of low fish abundance, and in some regions disasters like the Exxon-Valdez oil spill and threats like the development of large-scale mining projects (Braund 2017;Hébert 2015;Donkersloot 2007;Fall et al. 2006). ...
... Parameter estimates were averaged according to methods by Burnham and Anderson (2002), modified for design-based survey data using methods by Lumley and Scott (2015) Parameter since the privatization of access in many Alaskan fisheries in the mid-1970s (state limited entry program) and again in the mid-1990s (federal IFQ program). As families sold fishing rights during the initial period of privatization or moved away from their communities, an important opportunity to expose future generations of their family to fishing was lost, in many cases permanently (Apgar-Kurtz 2015;Langdon 1980;Reedy-Maschner 2007;Carothers 2008). In other cases, families were never engaged in fishing. ...
Commercial fishery participants in Alaska are increasing in age, and the next generation of fishermen faces numerous, complex barriers to entry into the industry. Although these barriers are now widely recognized, what remains to be seen is whether or not the youngest generation of coastal residents will choose place-based fishing livelihoods. In this study, we surveyed seventh through 12th grade students in the fishery-dependent Bristol Bay and Kodiak Archipelago regions of Alaska to explore what factors best predict students’ attitudes about commercial fishing and their communities. We used multinomial logit models of Likert-scale responses predicted by geographic, demographic, and social variables, as well as conditional inference trees to understand the direction, magnitude, and importance of the relationships among the predictor and response variables. Positive attitudes about fishing were best predicted by student experience in the commercial fishing industry, whether the student wanted to be involved in fishing in the future, and the importance of subsistence fishing to the student’s family. Age, how the student felt about their life, the importance of subsistence activities, and whether the student grew up in the community in which they were surveyed were all strongly related to the student’s positive attitude about their community. Youth surveyed in this study were highly uncertain about their futures, but key periods of exposure through community and family ties to fishing emerged as important mechanisms for engagement among the next generation of potential fishermen.
... 210, National Research Council, 1999). Lack of access to credit by local residents has also been identified as one of the causes for the long-term decline in local ownership of limited entry permits in Alaskan salmon fisheries (Langdon, 1980;Knapp, 2011). In Denmark, "captains of finance have used market-based management to expand their operations in alliance with legal advisors, accountants and in-vestors…" (p. ...
We study the optimal allocation of a resource in a second-best world in which parties may be liquidity-constrained due to credit frictions and capital market imperfections. In this setting, common to various natural resource industries, agents are unable to bid more than their budget regardless of their valuation. While auction markets are widely used mechanisms for allocating natural resource extraction rights and conservation contracts, we show that in these circumstances the competitive market -which allocates items based on rank order of bids- fails to achieve the first-best allocation. The market outcome is welfare-dominated by a hybrid mechanism consisting of random assignment followed by resale in a secondary market. Via the initial lottery, the hybrid-mechanism allocates the items with positive probability to high-valuation low-wealth individuals who would not have been able to afford them in a competitive market. High-valuation high-wealth agents, on the other hand, acquire the items in the secondary market if they do not receive them in the initial lottery. Therefore, equity in the allocation of access to the resource may be justified not only by distributional concerns but also by economic efficiency. We illustrate our model using data from buybacks of harvesting rights in the seafood industry.
... Privatization of commercial fishing rights has been in widespread practice in Alaska (Lowe and Carothers 2008). This began with the Limited Entry permit plan of 1970 for the State of Alaska's salmon and herring fisheries (Langdon 1980;Reedy-Maschner 2010). In the 1990s, halibut and sablefish IFQs were created. ...
As the North Pacific Fishery Management Council prepared to rationalize the Gulf of Alaska groundfish trawlers under the guise of bycatch management beginning in 2012, a social impact assessment investigated the fishery’s operations, stresses, dependencies, and desires of the primarily local Aleut (Unangan) fleets and families in the Western Gulf villages of King Cove and Sand Point, Alaska. This article describes the historical development of the local trawl fleet, their unique status in the fishery, and their rationale for their near universal rejection of a community protection measure. For these small coastal communities, the keys to success are competition, diversification into many fisheries, and supporting their communities through local hire and investment. Aleut fishermen feared that the impending neoliberal chapter would erase their history and traditions, remove competition, reallocate quota away from those that built the fishery and made it successful, diffuse fishermen’s support of their home communities, and undermine what it means to be Aleut. This fear is compounded by ecological changes affecting marine species abundances in the Gulf of Alaska.
... The program is viewed as a success by the state but the individualized transferability of permits has often meant that lower income families, including rural Natives dependent on subsistence and commercial fishing but vulnerable to the financial stress, are constrained to sell their permits to cope with debt. Within the first five years of the program, some 30 % of the limited entry permits were transferred from rural communities to outsiders, with severe impacts on the culture and economy of Native communities in particular (Langdon 1980). Transferrable fishing skills (i.e., harvest and processing tech niques), technologies (e.g., boats and gear), and catches (i.e., commercial fish retained for subsistence use) were attenuated with the loss of commercial fishing access, along with the organizational units of production, which for Southeast Alaska Tlingits and Haidas constituted a critical basis for modern occupational identity (e.g., boat captains and crews). ...
This paper examines processes by which Alaskan and Siberian indigenous peoples have been rendered as political subjects, “traditional” hunters-gathers, and sustainable enterprise owners amid their respective colonial and post-colonial industrial economies. The comparison is instructive because, despite being part of diametrically opposed (Soviet versus USA) national political organizations, policies and the exercise of biopower towards indigenous peoples have proceeded along similar lines. In the post-colonial era, these lines have converged around neoliberal and social development policies which support indigenous “self-determination” through minimal subsistence rights and the creation of ethnic enterprises and partnerships with non-indigenous capitalist corporations. On both sides of the North Pacific, however, this transition has come about without formal recognition of the well-developed systems of aboriginal marine tenure and fishing rights, as has been the case in other indigenous-state Treaty regimes (e.g., Canada and New Zealand). The lack of such protections, we argue, has led to poor management of coastal zones as social-ecological systems, making sustainable indigenous livelihoods and small enterprises based on marine resources difficult to develop or maintain. We examine, in particular, the relationship of Sakhalin and Southeast Alaska indigenous hunter-fishers as strong, independent peoples whose salmon fishing rights were usurped and their corporate groups reorganized to fit notions of modern industrial and neoliberal social-economic organization. Further, we argue for more synergistic policies between indigenous subsistence and commercial economies to reduce ‘black market’ transactions and conserve valuable fishing knowledge, skills, and cultural practices which are vital to heritage, livelihoods, and wellbeing.
Throughout Alaska, Indigenous fishing communities have been disproportionately and negatively impacted by policies that privatize access rights to the commercial fisheries. While the deleterious impacts of fisheries privatization on Alaska Native and rural Alaskans’ cultural lifeways, family systems, household economies, and community health have been extensively documented, the ways in which the dispossession of commercial fishing rights has contributed to colonial violence is less understood. Drawing on a community-based participatory study examining the colonial roots of sexual and domestic violence in Bristol Bay, Alaska, this paper explores Alaska Native survivors’ experiences with the shifts in commercial fisheries management systems, their perspectives of cultural and community changes brought on by fisheries privatization, and connection between those changes and colonial violence. The findings show that privatization processes—which have been commonly heralded as an economic and environmental solution to fisheries management—have profound socio-cultural effects that contribute to broader social ills of violence against women and substance abuse that are endemic to many of Alaska’s rural hubs and villages. These findings inform a broader social and political mandate for Indigenous Ocean justice to advance Tribal sovereignty and self-determination in fisheries management.
The challenge of designing institutions and resource policy for ecosystem and social resilience in rural and small-scale fisheries is receiving renewed attention in Alaska and elsewhere. Many rural and Indigenous fishing communities have been negatively impacted by modern resource allocation and management regimes that restrict and privatize fishery access through the creation of individual property rights. This article draws on ethnographic and interview data from a multi-sited study to improve policy considerations for rural and small-scale fisheries access. The Bristol Bay region of southwest Alaska is a site of concerning social trends including the ‘graying of the fleet’ and a rise in nonlocal ownership of fishing rights. Since the state began limiting entry into salmon fisheries in 1975, local permit holdings in Bristol Bay communities have declined by roughly 50%. This paper examines the ways in which assumptions and norms operating within state, regional, and local institutions support and/or constrain local fishing practices and participation in the region. A central objective is to challenge dominant and universalist assumptions of fishermen as dis-embedded, profit-maximizing, self-interested actors that do not fit well with small-scale, rural, and Indigenous fisheries. This paper identifies social relationships and interdependencies as central to rural fishing communities and livelihoods and absent from the rational choice/individual economic actor assumptions of modern resource allocation and management regimes. Findings presented here offer new framings for environmental analyses and help to inform solutions to ecological and social sustainability concerns marking global fisheries today.
In the wake of neoliberal reworking of Alaskan fisheries beginning in the 1970s, Tlingit and Haida village residents in southeast Alaska rapidly lost rights to commercial salmon and halibut fisheries, primarily through the sale of the property rights awarded to them when the programs were initiated. At the same time, the lack of capital, financial qualifications (collateral, credit history), and basic knowledge about the operation of bureaucratic systems of finance and property rights, prevented young village residents from purchasing the state-created permits needed for commercial fishing. While commercial fishing as an economic foundation of village life has virtually disappeared, nevertheless village residents maintain strong ties to the customary and traditional salmon systems which have sustained their communities – culturally and nutritionally – for thousands of years. Villagers acquire salmon using small-scale technologies consisting of open skiffs and nets pulled by hand, operated typically by crews of two or three men. While conducting their subsistence fisheries, they have identified numerous cases of unharvested surplus salmon at stream mouths which the permitted commercial purse seine fishery directed by the biological managers have failed to capture. They have perceived and advanced the possibility of developing local, community based small-scale fisheries to make use of the foregone harvests. The neoliberal regime has tightly aligned six sectors – legal practitioners (politicians and lawyers), resource managers (biologists), commercial fishing permit holders (producers), processing firms (capitalists), financiers (bankers) and policing agents (enforcement personnel) – into an assemblage I refer to as “Leviathan”. This hybrid alignment presents itself and acts as an impregnable entity protecting the interests of its collaborators from the establishment of new fisheries or the entrance of new practices into its alignment. This paper will (1) describe the components and construction of “Leviathan” as it operates to protect itself, (2) demonstrate how an “optimizing” logic of cost minimization in management and production results in underutilization of salmon available for harvest and (3) present two case studies of salmon stocks that are presently not being utilized that could become community-based, small scale commercial fisheries that would be of substantial economic benefit to village residents for whom “Leviathan” makes no provision.
This book investigates the current role of women and men in a variety of northern subsistence and industrial fisheries, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, rural and urban-based in Alaska, Arctic Canada, Norway, Iceland and Sweden. Fishing often makes an important contribution to food security in northern regions and provides important occupational and economic diversification in small communities. Attention is drawn to the need for a more critical and nuanced understanding of gender roles in northern fisheries particularly as modernization further alters customary roles and attitudes.
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