Fish, fishers, and other fishy things*

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Fish, fishers, and other fishy things

• Using agent based models to explore global
  environmental governance

Thomas Jensen can be blamed for this fishy title.
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Global Commons

• Small but important set of issues
• Climate/atmosphere
• Biodiversity
• Outer space
• Deep seabed
• International fisheries
• Typical tragedy of the commons
• Overexploitation/overcapitalization
• Underprovision of management

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Global Commons

• Small but important set of issues
• Climate/atmosphere
• Biodiversity
• Outer space
• Deep seabed
• International fisheries
• Typical tragedy of the commons
• Overexploitation/overcapitalization
• Underprovision of management

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International Fisheries
(Highly Migratory Species)
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International Fish
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Separate Literatures

• PoliSci/IR
• Verbal models
• Qualitative cases, thick description

• Bioeconomics
• Formal models
• Anecdotal evidence some empirics

Insights from both, but neither explains/predicts
recent successes
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Combine Strengths?

• Incorporate politics into formal bioeconomic
  models (more than social discount rate)
• Develop better empirical tests of those models

Complex complex Intractable math
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(No Transcript)
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Starting Simple

• M Understand the impact of economic asymmetry on
  international management
• NH Distribution of marginal costs of production
  have no effect on international management

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Bioeconomics

• P1 Gordon-Shaeffer model
• Increase E if , decrease otherwise
  (Conrad 1999)

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Politics/International

• P2 Governments concern commercial fishing
• P3 Switch to policy if consensus
• Choices six levels of cooperative effort open
  access
• Historical distribution under cooperation
• No sidepayments
• Observe defection, no punishment

Go to model
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Conclusions

• C1 International cost structure can matter
  especially if politics matter
• Absolute level of costs
• Relative level of costs
• C2 Different equilibria from different initial
  conditions
• C3 Still so much work to do

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Testing the Model

• Diagnostics (archeology)/Behavior space
• Calibration empirical analysis
• Predicts that countries w/ higher marginal costs
  are driven out of the fishery
• Use Wald test to check for significant reversals
  in national harvests (Granato)
• Problems lack of data, deep uncertainty,
  non-linear relationships

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Thanks, EITM!
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Barriers to Cooperation

• Arguments over allocation
• All benefit from successful management
• Each benefits from maximizing access for domestic
  fishing industry
• Poor contractual environment
• Scope scale
• Sovereignty / national capacity
• New entrant problem

Literature Very Pessimistic
International Relations Peterson (1995 2000),
Young (1999), and De Sombre (1999
2002) Economics Clark (1990), Kaitala and Munro
(1993), Hannesson (1997), Bjorndal, et al (2000),
McKelvey, Sandal, and Steinshamn (2003)