Individual transferable quotas, community-based fisheries management systems, and "virtual" communities

The economic problems bedevilling many of the world's capture fishery resources are seen to lie, not in fishers' "greed," but rather in the existence of a perverse incentive system arising, in turn, from ill-defined or nonexistent property rights. If it is difficult to vest property rights to these resources in individual fishers, it is possible to vest the rights, on a collective basis, in groups of fishers. We use the term virtual communities to describe such groups of fishers. The term, originating with the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Committee on Ecosystem Management for Sustainable Marine Fisheries, can, under the right circumstances, be applied to Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs) schemes as well as to geographically based communities.