To Fish Or Not To Fish: What are the Questions?

Fisheries scholars have long acknowledged that a tendency to misunderstand fisher behavior is often a more critical factor in the collapse of fisheries around the world than any lack of knowledge of resources themselves (Hilborn 1985; Salas and Gaertner 2004). The dynamics under which people leave fishing has taken on particular significance in scholarship on “fisher behavior”. Hilborn’s (1989) call for analyzing the "dynamic behavior of fishing fleets" outlines four areas that reflect the prominence of economics in fisheries social science: investment, movement, catching power, and discarding. Gordon (1954), advocating a “bioeconomic” framework which combined biological theories of how fish stocks grow with neoclassical economic assumptions of human behavior, hypothesized that the socially optimum allocation of labor must take into account industry profit, but did not consider social benefits and therefore labor decisions beyond profits. Even while these calls expand out beyond biological analyses they look outward from the fishing sector only slightly in terms of productive activities that individuals engage in.

Allison and Ellis (2001) advocate an outward facing approach to understanding how fishing industries change via the “sustainable livelihoods approach” to fisheries management, which interprets peoples’ actions as part of long-term livelihood “strategies” that are embedded in economic needs but also social responsibilities and relationships, and particular to spatial, temporal and cultural contexts. Like everyone, fishers are people living in particular societies and times that also influence their occupational and harvest choices. To meaningfully understand the breadth of influences on peoples’ actions, attending to the resource user perspective on the role that fishing fulfills for an individual and household is critical (Allison and Ellis 2001).

Livelihood scholarship has commonly utilized a conceptual framework of investigating the “assets-mediating processes-activities” framework, which begins with a focus on household asset bases, the portfolio of work activities they engage in, and the mediating processes that enable people to actually translate their assets into activities, previously described in Chapter 1. Ellis (2000) notes that assets are “the basic building blocks upon which households are able to undertake production, engage in labour markets, and participate in reciprocal exchanges with other households” (31). Differential access to resources, activities, and asset bases (including income) is thought to produce a differential ability of individuals and household to adapt to livelihood change and uncertainty, including via job switching.

Beyond the general livelihoods approach, two prominent theories of individual

differentiation in fishing exits have emerged from past work on livelihoods, fisheries migrations, and exits from fishing industries (Terkla et al. 1988; Scoones 1998; Ellis 2000; Pollnac et al. 2001; Cinner et al. 2009). One is what is termed here the “poverty trap hypothesis”, which posits that some individuals remain in fishing because they lack the means to leave. Fishing can have a relatively low cost to entry, particularly in artisanal fisheries that are relatively low-tech (Allison

and Ellis 2000) or open access. Cinner et al. (2009) found that “fishers from poorer households were less likely to exit a severely declining fishery”. Poverty can play into some peoples’ calculus to become fishers, stay in fishing, and their ability to leave fishing. Poverty represents not simply an absence of wealth but different responses to change; poorer people can be more risk averse, prioritizing less-risky strategies over profit maximization. They relate this behavior with literature on poverty traps in general,

“situations in which poor people are unable to mobilize the necessary resources to overcome either shocks or chronic low-income situations and consequently remain in poverty. Generally, the poor are excluded from higher-return livelihood strategies because of constraints on cash liquidity, a lack of access to credit, and social exclusion (Dasgupta 1997; Adato et al. 2006; Barrett et al. 2006). (Cinner 2009: 128)”

Others have summarized the plethora of non-economic motives driving occupational choice under the concept of job satisfaction. A “satisfaction bonus” has been hypothesized to have a retentive effect on labor in fishing but for reasons of choice, keeping fishing rates high even beyond what makes economic sense (e.g., Anderson 1980; Smith 1988; Pollnac and Poggie 1988). Pollnac et al. (2001) infer that higher than average job satisfaction among fishermen may contribute to the ambiguous outcomes of many policy interventions specifically designed to get people to leave fishing, asserting that a fundamental and erroneous assumption of alternate livelihood programs is that fishing is “a dirty, hard, undesirable occupation, hence employment of last resort and that fishers are amongst the poorest of the poor” (531). Surveys in Asia and Alaska raise doubt over the idea thatpeople would leave for comparable income elsewhere, and note a “psycho-cultural” attachment to fishing by some personality types who have higher risk tolerance than non-fishers, generating resistance to exiting (Pollnac and Poggie 1988; Pollnac et al. 2001; Pollnac and Poggie 2006). In a comparative study of small-scale fishers in the

Philippines, Vietnam and Indonesia, Pollnac et al. (2001) found that a minority of fishers (16, 25, and 36% respectively), would readily leave the occupation and many would recommend it to

their children. Because researchers specifically posed hypothetical choices involving equal or better pay, results indicated that people do not engage in fishing purely for economic incentives. The above studies however involved only active fishers and tested decisions to leave with hypothetical questions.