Legitimacy and Effectiveness through Fisheries Co-Management

Abstract

It is timely to consider the key importance of co-management institutional arrangements in successful fisheries management. Co-management is powersharing between government agencies charged with the responsibility of governing one or more natural resources and the place-based communities, organizations, or regions that are most affected by the agency’s decisions.1 Feit prefers to call such arrangements ‘co-governance’,2 but it can be useful to reserve this term for high levels of power-sharing in joint policy-making, while operational decisions such as how, when, and where to take actions are termed ‘co-management’. Co-management and even co-governance often begins as an ‘incomplete’ arrangement in which the scope and geographic scale of the power of the non-government party is fairly limited.3 Although such arrangements often evolve, it is seldom to the point of joint policy-making. Authentic co-governance is usually driven by court decisions or unique policy situations. Legitimacy is essential in fisheries co-management. Both the legitimacy of senior governments and the legitimacy of local authorities who are working with these senior governments are important. Although it is desirable to have both types of legitimacy, local legitimacy is indispensable and can make a system work, even if senior government legitimacy is lacking. There is high