The Tragedy of the Commons and High Seas Fishery Management

High seas fisheries have been at the forefront of the debate on how to best manage common-property resources over the past few decades as conservation concerns have grown. Studies show that the North Atlantic bluefin tuna stock has steadily declined since governments first began recording catch totals about fifty years ago, and in the late 1990s, scientists believed the North Atlantic swordfish fishery was near collapse. This paper first explains the economic theory of the tragedy of the commons, and discusses different common-property management systems, specifically focusing on adaptive governance. The adaptive governance framework is then used to analyze the cases of the North Atlantic bluefin tuna and the North Atlantic swordfish, attempting to determine how the swordfish stock has rebounded while the bluefin tuna continues to decline. The findings are that the swordfish fishermen were able to collaborate with management whereas that has not been true in the case of the bluefin tuna. High seas fishery management will continue to be debated until a management system is able to clearly define the boundaries of the common-property resource