Adaptive maritime domain planning model: Transferable fishing concessions in Croatia

The Croatian long-lasting fisheries problem still vivid one year after the Croatian admission to the EU is overfishing in a “common pool resource”. After the questionable success of previous policies, the new EU Integrated Maritime Policy devolves some of the mechanisms of the Common Fisheries Policy to the member states. This gives Croatia the opportunity to set policies that reflect its own interests: to rebuild its fish stocks, its fishing fleet and the supporting fish processing, services, and shipbuilding industries. This may be achieved without direct command and control governmental intervention used in the past. The institutionalisation of fishing rights in the general form of Transferable Fishing Concessions and in particular as it is known in the EU: Individual Transferable Quotas, creates a new asset, with benefits to entrepreneurs and entire industries. They may be used as a collateral for fishers during the investment cycle, a source of information, an incentive for monitoring of competitors, and a source of windfall profits. Therefore, we argue that Transferable Fishing Concessions could enable the internalisation of negative externalities across Croatian Adriatic fisheries