Fish are a textbook case of a resource that everyone owns and nobody manages.
A boat that leaves a fish in the water gains nothing if another boat takes it.
therefore expand until the catch per boat is barely worth the fuel.
make this worse by paying for the fuel directly.
systems address the problem by allocating a share of the catch in advance.
If the share is secure, a fisher has an interest in a larger stock next year.
Countries that introduced secure quotas have seen several recover.
The distribution of quotas is where the politics sits.
Allocating by historical catch rewards the boats that fished hardest when there were no limits.
s also become assets, and small operators sell them to larger ones within a decade.
Coastal communities then lose the that the policy protected.
Reserving a portion for small , and forbidding its sale, holds that outcome off.
at sea is the part that no design avoids, and it is expensive everywhere.