On the Enforcement of Territorial Use Rights Regulations: A Game Theoretic Approach

Territorial Use Rights (commonly known as TURFs in the literature) consists in the allocation of fishing rights to individuals and/or groups to fish in certain geographical locations. A requisite for these communities to be granted fishing rights is the formulation of a management and exploitation plan (MEP). While thus far the literature on TURFs has been centred on the biological and technical aspects of it, to our knowledge there is no work squarely dealing with the issue of enforcement of the MEP that the community, once granted the fishing use rights, have to comply with. We formally explore this issue from an economic perspective by formulating a static game of norm compliance in a regime of common property resource exploitation. The key characteristic of this game is a monitoring and sanctioning mechanism, where fishermen monitor and sanction one another. We found that in the absence of any endogenous regulation from the part of the fishing community, TURFs can not avoid the economic overexploitation of the fishery. We discuss the importance of economic incentives (and disincentives) in the formulation of endogenous regulations aimed at ensuring compliance of the MEP. Our results on the relevance of economic incentives in the context of a TURF regulation can also be used to highlight the importance of less conventional enforcement tools.