Making Space for Community Use Rights: Insights From “Community Economies” in Newfoundland and Labrador

ABSTRACT

Community use rights are rarely considered to be an economically viable or efficient option in conventional fisheries management policy. Our analysis challenges this view by pointing to the positive economic and social outcomes of community use rights in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. We argue that resources allocated to community-based organizations can be used to build “community economies,” in the theoretical vocabulary of J. K. Gibson-Graham. By combining insights of Gibson-Graham’s diverse economies framework with an empirical analysis of how ethical decision making helped build and sustain community economies in three fishing regions, the article promotes the allocation of new community use rights in fisheries and beyond.

KEYWORDS:

• Community economies
• community use rights
• diverse economies
• fisheries
• Newfoundland and Labrador

Community use rights feature rarely in conventional fisheries management policy. This is mainly because the management of fish resources has shifted increasingly to allocation systems that privilege individual use rights that are often transferable (Copes and Palsson 2000; Apostle, McCay, and Mikalsen 2002; Olson 2011; Carothers and Chambers 2012). Individual use rights in fisheries management, such as individual transferable quotas (ITQs), are justified on the basis that they are economically efficient and lead to sustainable resource use (McCay 1995; 2004), although this is hotly debated in what is a very large body of work on the effects of ITQs (Bromley 2009; Pinkerton and Edwards 2009; Olson 2011). Community use rights in conventional fisheries management policy are, in contrast, usually viewed as anachronistic, or only suitable to developing country or indigenous contexts (St Martin 2001; 2005; Olson 2011; St Martin and Hall-Arber 2008). In the more industrialized world, as St Martin (2005) has argued, community use rights tend to be seen as part of a “mythic past,” and not consistent with industrial and capitalist fishing practices. For Olson (2011, 248) the relative absence of “community” within fisheries resource management is a result of “persistent discourses that locate community and culture outside modernity and rationality.” In this discourse, community use rights are not suitable for industrial and capitalist fisheries, which are best managed according to ITQs.

Despite the limited role of community use rights in fisheries, there are a number of outstanding examples in both artisanal and industrial contexts where they have been implemented with positive economic and social outcomes. The Alaska Community Development Quota (CDQ) program is perhaps the most well-known and celebrated example (Ginter 1995; Holland and Ginter 2001). In the early 1990s, when fisheries managers were implementing ITQs, policymakers decided to reserve a proportion of the quota of Alaska pollock for poor and vulnerable fisheries-dependent communities, many of which had a high proportion of Native Alaskans (Mansfield 2007). The CDQ program is widely regarded as one of the most successful community use rights systems (Mansfield 2007; Langdon 2008; McCay 2008). It has allowed communities in smaller coastal towns to use quotas to earn royalties from industrial offshore fleets as a way to support economic and social activities, and these have played a key role in job creation and infrastructure development (Holland and Ginter 2001; Carothers, Lew, and Sepez 2010). In this way, the CDQ program has effectively embedded wealth from offshore fish resources in Alaskan coastal communities. The Alaska CDQ program is perhaps the most well-known community quota, but it is not the only one. In the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, the Sambro community quota not only improved the economic situation of this coastal community, but it also led to more sustainable use of the fish resource (Loucks 1998). In the United Kingdom, the Shetland Islands case provides a European example of how community-based organizations secured quotas for local harvesters to ensure that the resource remained in the hands of local harvesters and local communities (Crean 1999; Goodlad 2000). The recent debate in the United States around “catch shares” points to the potential for a new and expanded role for community use rights in this country and beyond, because they allow fish resources to be allocated to a wide range of stakeholders including cooperatives and community groups (National Panel on the Community Dimensions of Fisheries Catch Share Programmes [NPCD] 2011; Grimm et al. 2012; Macinko 2013; Brewer 2014; McCay et al. 2013; Severance 2014).

Yet strengthening the case for community use rights in fisheries policy in the United States and elsewhere depends, crucially, on providing convincing evidence for policymakers that these rights can be used to sustain coastal communities, both economically and socially (NPCD 2011; McCay et al. 2013). Our article contributes to this debate by providing important new knowledge on innovative state-based allocations to community-based organizations that embed resource development benefits in remote fishing-dependent communities. The article’s empirical analysis is based on research on the wild-caught shrimp (Pandalus borealis) fishery in the North Atlantic. Set against the backdrop of this large, geographically extensive fishery, we examine the allocation of shrimp resources (offshore licenses and special allocations) by the state to three remote coastal regions in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador and their representative community-based organizations. These organizations used their allocated use rights to earn royalties from offshore industrial interests and in turn reinvested those royalties to develop local fish processing capacity, to develop the inshore owner-operator fishery, and to diversify local and regional economies. The allocations have played a crucial role in the economic and social sustainability of these three regions. Drawing on theoretical insight from J. K. Gibson-Graham, our analysis illustrates not only how community use rights in fisheries can play a vital role in the economic and social sustainability of coastal settlements but also, more importantly, how community-based socioeconomic organizations controlling those use rights are constituted to effectively engage in alternative, community-oriented business practices within a modern global capitalist context. In this way, our analysis provides a strong challenge to the contemporary discourse on fisheries resource allocation that sees community use rights outside of the modern economy and not well suited to productive and surplus generating economies.

The remainder of the article is divided into five parts. In the next section we describe the theoretical and methodological approach of the analysis. The third section examines the origins of the community use rights in Canada’s offshore shrimp sector. We then explore the origins of the three community-based organizations in our study and we describe their organizational form. In the fifth section, we discuss how royalties earned by three community-based organizations were used to support inshore fishery development, including onshore processing capacity, and other economic and social activities. The Discussion section and Conclusion of the article reflect on how J. K. Gibson-Graham (pen name for two authors) and their community economies collective provide a way of making space for community use rights in fisheries management. We argue that the empirical analysis of actually existing community use rights, combined with the insights of Gibson-Graham’s diverse economies, opens up the potential for developing new resource allocation regimes in fisheries and beyond.

Theory and Methodology

In making the case for relocating community resource rights within the modern economy, we draw on the theoretical work of J. K. Gibson-Graham and their diverse economies collective. Gibson-Graham have been working for almost two decades urging researchers and activists to reveal the diversity of economic relations that exist in contemporary society. Their claim is that the economy is a “proliferative space of difference,” which affirms the wide range of economic practices that exist in the economy (Gibson-Graham 2008, 617). Economic relations, they argue, are more contingent and flexible than most mainstream and critical approaches assume. The many case studies that have emerged from their collaborative project highlight how the form, function, and decision making of enterprises vary considerably from the standard model that appears in business textbooks.

The diverse economies theoretical and practical project is characterized by two interrelated theoretical strategies that will inform the empirical analysis that follows here. The first involves identifying difference and diversity in the economy, a practice that reveals the economy as a “proliferative space of difference.” In their formulation, the economy is not driven just by abstract logic, but is instead a space of diversity in terms of organizational form and decision-making. The second and closely related strategy in the Gibson-Graham project involves mobilizing the concept and practice of community economies. The idea of community economies is not a merging of the words “community” and “economy.” Such a “community economies” simple union, Gibson-Graham (2006, 86) argue, relegates the community economy as “‘other’ to the so-called ‘real’ economy of international markets, competitive dynamics, and agglomerative tendencies that operate at the global scale.” “Community” in their work is also not an object of analysis that might involve asking the question “Is this a community or not?” Community is instead a way of affirming interdependence and a “being in-common.” The community economy, in this formulation, asserts the interdependence of our decision making, including economic decision making. In this way, community economies emphasize “economic being in-common,” and aim to identify “coordinates for negotiating and exploring interdependence” (Gibson-Graham 2006, 86).

In recognizing the interdependence of economic decision making, the broader implication of the work of J. K. Gibson-Graham—and a growing number of scholars who follow their inspiration (e.g., Burke and Shear 2014)—is to see the economy as a space of ethical decision making. The diversity of economic relations and organizational forms revealed in their research has led Gibson-Graham to highlight “the ethical decisions that are made within the organization that produce multiple or hybrid identities and the way that enterprise dynamics are motivated by these relationships and choices, rather than by mechanistic logics” (Gibson-Graham 2006, 74).

We contribute to and integrate insights from the diverse economies project by examining how ethical decisions created space for both community resource rights and diverse economic organizations and practices in an Atlantic Canadian shrimp fishery. The research methodology included 2-week community field visits and face-to-face key-informant interviews in three case-study regions of the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. In addition to reviewing existing literature on the cases, we conducted face-to-face semistructured key informant interviews with people knowledgeable about the emergence and impacts of the shrimp fishery in each region—southeast Labrador, the Northern Peninsula, and Fogo Island. Our sampling method was purposive (Palys 2008): We were interested in interviewing individuals who were closely linked to the three organizations identified in our study. Interviews focused on individuals with knowledge of direct or indirect benefits of the organizations and royalties, including harvesters, processing plant workers, town councilors, development organization workers, and business representatives. In total, 54 individuals were interviewed—17 on Fogo Island, 11 in the Northern Peninsula region, and 23 in southeast Labrador (as well as three in St. John’s who provided insights into the history of shrimp resource allocation policies). All but five of the interviews, which lasted between 30 minutes and 2 hours, were recorded using a digital audio recorder. The interviews were transcribed and then explored for themes, patterns, and evidence that allowed us to reconstruct and analyze the economic impact of shrimp allocations in the three regions. Interviews were semi-tructured to gain insight into how the organizations were established, how they used royalties in their respective regions, and how economically important the organizations have been for people living in the respective regions.

Resource Allocation for Community Economies: Ethical Decision Making

Northern shrimp (pandalus borealis) is an important cold-water prawn species harvested north of 40 degrees latitude in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Before the late 1970s, Danish, Norwegian, and Faroese companies harvested northern shrimp in the North Atlantic using large factory freezer trawlers. Canadian fishing companies were not involved in the industry because they lacked the infrastructure—in the form of ice-strengthened vessels—to harvest and process shrimp offshore. This situation changed after 1977 when Canada declared a 200-mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ), which effectively enclosed most of the northern shrimp fishery and motivated the Canadian state to embark on a process of “Canadianizing” the then international fishery (Allain 2010).

The development of allocations that could support community economies depended fundamentally on political decisions during the Canadianization process. The authority to allocate fish resources in Canada is concentrated in the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO), and the initial allocation of offshore shrimp licenses in the late 1970s was strongly influenced by the Minister of DFO, Roméo LeBlanc, who held the position from 1974 to 1982. LeBlanc was an outspoken supporter of small boat harvesters and of remote coastal communities that were dependent on fishing (Matthews 1983). When the initial allocation of 11 offshore licenses for northern shrimp was made in 1978, LeBlanc’s approach to resource allocation was evident: Eight of the licenses were allocated to cooperatives and community groups in Atlantic Canada, with the remaining three going to large commercial companies that had substantial processing operations in coastal communities. By allocating the majority of the initial 11 licenses to cooperatives and community groups, LeBlanc hoped to anchor economic benefits of offshore resources in coastal communities in Atlantic Canada.¹

LeBlanc’s decision to allocate offshore licenses to the case examined in Labrador was shaped by the leadership of a relatively new fishing union in the province. Richard Cashin, president of the province’s Food, Fish and Allied Workers Union (FFAW) in Newfoundland and Labrador, played an important role in convincing LeBlanc to allocate licenses to specific regions of coastal communities in Labrador. Cashin argued that small coastal communities along the Labrador coast should be granted licenses for northern shrimp as they were adjacent to the largest known stocks of this commercially lucrative crustacean. In making a case for allocating licenses to communities in Labrador, Cashin relied on LeBlanc’s well-known desire to allocate resources to small boat fishers and remote coastal communities. With help from Cashin, small boat fish harvesters in southeast Labrador created a cooperative to apply for two of the three licenses designated for the southeast region of the Labrador coast.² The cooperative’s application was successful, and this organization, which later changed its name to the Labrador Fishermen’s Union Shrimp Company Ltd. (LFUSC), represents the first of our three case studies. The beneficiaries of these licenses were small and remote coastal communities from Cartwright to L’Anse au Clair with a total population size of around 4,500 in 2011 (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Location of three case-study regions in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada.

Subsequent DFO Ministers granted shrimp allocations to the other two case studies in the late 1990s and early 2000s during a period in which northern shrimp stocks off Newfoundland and Labrador grew in abundance. Shrimp stocks off Canada’s Atlantic coast increased dramatically during the 1990s, in part due to the collapse of cod, which is a key predator of shrimp (Haedrich and Hamilton 2000). The strong evidence of a healthy and growing biomass of shrimp, combined with increasing pressure from inshore harvesters to secure access to new resources in the context of groundfish collapse, led the Minister of DFO to increase quotas for existing offshore license holders through the decade and to grant new access rights to hundreds of inshore owner-operators along the northeast coast of Newfoundland and Labrador. In a context of a relative abundance of shrimp stocks and in the face of a policy that restricted the issuance of new offshore shrimp licenses in order to prevent overcapacity, the Minster distributed several new “special allocations” of shrimp to communities adjacent to the resource. In 1997 DFO granted its first special allocation of 3,000 tonnes of shrimp to communities on the northern tip of the Northern Peninsula of the island of Newfoundland (Figure 1).

Special allocations were not offshore licenses, which entitle license holders to use a vessel to catch quotas linked to the license. Instead, special allocations were modeled on strategies used by community-based offshore license holders, such as the LFUSC, which deployed their fishing use rights to secure royalties from vessel-owning offshore license holders. As had been the case with the Labrador offshore licenses, the shrimp special allocation for the Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland was designated specifically for a region encompassing a group of communities, in this case from the area of Big Brook to Goose Cove with a total population of approximately 4,500 in 2011 (Figure 1). A community-based organization, St. Anthony Resources Basin Incorporated (SABRI), was established to administer the special allocation. SABRI represents the second community-based organization in our study. In 2000, other special allocations of shrimp were granted, including 1,000 tonnes to a fishing cooperative on Fogo Island, which is made up of several communities with a total population size of just less than 2,400 in 2011. The Fogo Island Cooperative Society Ltd. (hereafter Fogo Island Co-op), the third of our case studies, administered this quota.

The decisions to allocate use rights for northern shrimp to communities and community-based organizations was a pioneering example of how ethical spaces of decision can emerge in fisheries management. Indeed, the first allocations in the late 1970s predate the much more widely known Alaska CDQ by almost two decades (Ginter 1995). This was a period in which resource allocation policies in Canada and elsewhere were shifting toward individual licenses and quotas, as well as enterprise allocations (Crowley and Pallson 1992); in this context, the decisions to allocate significant portions of the shrimp resource to community interests in the late 1970s, and again in the late 1990s, made the development of community economies not only possible but also an explicit, ethically informed fisheries management objective. The next section examines how the three beneficiaries in our study—the LFUSC, SABRI, and the Fogo Island Co-op—were constituted and how they used their allocations to build and sustain coastal community economies.

Organizational Dimensions: Institutions for Community Economies

Unlike the Alaska CDQ program, where organizations holding community use rights were established according to specific legislated guidelines, the three community-based entities in our case study are diverse in terms of their organizational structure. The structure of the LFUSC, a limited liability company since the early 1980s, was shaped by its initial establishment as a fisher cooperative in the late 1970s with as many as 900 members, the vast majority of whom were small boat owners. The early membership included many women, as they often fished together with their husbands in small boats. Shareholders/fishers were granted one share of the new cooperative and one vote to elect an eight-member board of directors who became involved in the day to day running of the organization, and the management of the two shrimp licenses it was granted in the late 1970s in the interests of people living in the region encompassing communities between L’Anse aux Clair and Cartwright in southeast Labrador. This cooperative structure remained in place following the transition to a limited liability company. In contrast, SABRI is a not-for-profit organization managed by a board consisting of fifteen volunteers. These volunteers represent multiple constituencies that includes harvesters (five members), fish plant workers (four members), community representatives (four members), and representatives of local regional development committees (two members). SABRI’s mandate is to use its 3,000-tonne special allocation of shrimp to diversify and develop the regional economy of the Great Northern Peninsula. The Fogo Island Co-op’s origins are not tied to shrimp resource allocations. It was established in the late 1960s to resist federal–provincial proposals to relocate residents of Fogo Island to the main island of Newfoundland as part of a modernization program aimed at consolidating remote coastal settlements. The Fogo Island Co-op’s success in resisting resettlement was based partly on an intercommunity revitalization process that allowed fish harvesters and residents to transcend deeply rooted intercommunity and interreligious tensions on the island, which includes about 11 distinct communities. The co-op has since provided a mechanism through which to unite the island’s residents and communities, and facilitated the forging of an island-wide identity. In the late 1990s it was successful in securing a 1,000-tonne shrimp quota, which has contributed to its ongoing effort to sustain economic development on Fogo Island.

The three organizations in our study have diverse, locally developed organizational forms and structures. Yet they share not only their location in rural coastal communities but also an organizational goal of using access to shrimp resources for building community economies. For example, the LFUSC’s constitution helps ensure that “monies derived from the offshore shrimp licences would go into infrastructure along the coast to enhance the lives of individuals encompassing the whole region” (cited in Graham 2007). SABRI’s mandate also reflects its commitment to regional development. Their mandate refers specifically to its allocation of shrimp, which it administers “on behalf of the communities from Big Brook to Goose Cove, in a manner resulting in expansion of the region’s economic base and improved employment opportunities in harmony with a rural setting and lifestyle” (SABRI 2003). Although its origin is not tied to the shrimp fishery, the Fogo Island Co-op has a mandate similar to the first two community-based organizations in our study. It is a harvester/plant worker-owned cooperative that has a mandate to support the regional and economic development of Fogo Island.

In each region, the fishing organizations are widely understood as a special type of economic organization. Our interviews in all the three regions revealed the significance of the structure and decision-making mandate of these community based organizations, and in particular how their decision making set them apart from privately owned fishing enterprises. Speaking with reference to the Labrador Shrimp Company, one of our research participants stressed its constitution, which structured the relationship between owners and the company, and shaped its community oriented investment decisions:

The Shrimp Company has a constitution that’s a lot different than a lot of other companies … they basically set up their constitution in such a way that we could become shareholders but the only way you get share in “profits” was through infrastructure that would be done along the coast. And that, I think that was a key thing in its success. (Interviews)

Another participant elaborated on the specific economic purpose of the Shrimp Company:

We’re going to have a company, but we’re not going to throw out dividends to everybody—you know a 500 dollar cheque at the end of the year—that does nobody any good. And any monies that’s spent is going to be pooled and is going to be spent on infrastructure in communities for our wives and our children and our kin hopefully as long as possible in the community. (Interviews)

For the SABRI case, one research participant described why a decision was made to continue to invest in a particular business operation that was only marginally viable:

We are a social enterprise … I mean that’s what we’re really about, right. I mean there’s no point of us having a big fat bank account, nothing going on in the region. That doesn’t do anything, right. So we got to invest it in, in economic benefits for the region that people can capitalize on and people can say that they can stay here and work and get meaningful employment. (Interviews)

Bernadette Dwyer, a long-time member of the Fogo Island Co-op, outlined a similar vision of the relationship between originally common, public natural resources and community economies when she described how the revenues derived from its special allocation were being used on the island:

This money is being used for economic development. I guess that’s the point we’re trying to make here with common resources. Communities have the ability to be able to create sustainable economic opportunities in their communities. If common resources are going to be allocated, then we should look at what those communities can do with those resources once given to them. (Dwyer 2002)

One of our research participants in Labrador was quick to add that the distinct social purpose of the Labrador Shrimp Company did not mean it ignored basic business principles: “It’s not that the Shrimp Company doesn’t operate with good business principles, they just make sure that the funds filter back to the community” (Interviews). Indeed, as several other research participants from each region informed us, good business decision making could not be ignored, as it was crucial to both the organizations and the economic sustainability of remote coastal communities.

Our research participants’ descriptions of the three organizations and their decision making around shrimp royalties resonate strongly with the concepts articulated by Gibson-Graham and others working in the diverse economies collective. The three organizations in our study embody the two strategies or moves in the Gibson-Graham project. They are constituted differently, and in this way they reflect the diversity of economic organization in the real economy. The organizations depend on innovative forms of resource allocation, which reveals the diverse ways in which resources can be allocated by policy makers and used by communities. At the same time, they share a common goal of sustaining their local economies and communities and in this way provide a strong alternative to how common resources can be used to benefit remote coastal communities. We are not suggesting that these are “communities” in the traditional sense of the term; we are, however, arguing that they are community economies in that their decision making reflects the economic “being in common” that Gibson-Graham articulate in their conceptualization of diverse economies. Next, we analyze specific types of royalties and investments made by the three organizations in our study to further illustrate the diverse economies being practiced in these three regions.

Royalties and Investments: Strategies and Practices of Community Economies

The royalty strategy that became institutionalized in Canada’s northern shrimp fishery provides an example of the partial, hybrid integration of community use rights and community economies into industrial, capitalist relations. The three organizations in our study—the Labrador Shrimp Company, SABRI, and the Fogo Island Co-op—leased their quotas to enterprises with factory freezer trawlers in return for royalties. The royalty arrangements that became common practice in the offshore shrimp fishery were initially permitted by DFO in the 1970s and 1980s during the Canadianization process as a transition mechanism between new domestic license holders without vessels and international shrimp vessel owners until domestic license holders purchased their own factory freezer trawlers (Allain 2010). License holders such as the Labrador Shrimp Company were, however, concerned about the extremely high costs and financial risk involved in purchasing a factory freezer trawler and as a result lobbied the federal government to continue the practice of permitting charter/royalty arrangements for license holders that did not own a vessel. One of the important advantages of the royalty system for community organizations holding an offshore shrimp license was that it enabled them to avoid debt payments that a major initial investment would require, allowing for investments into inshore fishery development and infrastructure. The unintended success of the Labrador Shrimp Company in leasing allocations to separate companies in return for a major influx of capital partly inspired the policy design, and community-based use, of special allocations in the late 1990s.

Royalty payments negotiated between the community-based organizations and offshore shrimp license holders who owned a factory freezer trawler were normally based on a fixed rate per tonne of shrimp harvested. Most royalty agreements in the offshore shrimp fishery more broadly were around 11% of the landed value of the catch (Allain 2010), which generated substantial revenue for license holders. The Labrador Shrimp Company, for example, received $750,000 in 1978, the first year that it earned royalties. The Labrador Shrimp Company has been able to invest as much as $60 million in Labrador communities through royalty earnings (Allain 2010). SABRI’s royalties were as much as $1.75 million per year in return for its 3,000-tonne special allocation in the late 1990s. Fogo Island reported $400,000 in royalties in the first year of its special allocation. These royalty payments changed over time, depending on market conditions and the overall size of the quota. In broad terms, the royalties are used by the organizations to support economic actors that are vulnerable to the pressures of globalization; generate much-needed employment opportunities; diversify their economic base; and invest in social and cultural activities in their respective regions.

Shore-based processing plants play a crucial role in creating diversity within each coastal community economy, bolstering employment and economic impacts beyond the male-dominated fish harvesting sector. The Labrador Shrimp Company’s first major investment was in a fresh fish processing plant located in the small community of L’Anse au Loup that had gone bankrupt, leaving local fishers and plant workers, many of whom were women, unpaid for fish delivered and hours worked. The Labrador Shrimp Company used royalties to take over the operation and pay off outstanding bills, including plant workers’ wages, fishers’ bills, and money owed to small businesses. This initial investment played an important role in establishing the company’s identity as an organization that supported inshore fishers, plant workers, and communities in southeast Labrador. It purchased a plant that not only supported plant workers, but also small boat fishers and their families in and around L’Anse au Loup. As one interview participant said, “The plant was doing everything possible to keep the small boat fishermen alive, and only because the way it’s operated, and the plant is owned by the fishermen and the fishermen makes decisions” (Interviews).

All three community-based organizations in our study used royalties to invest in onshore shrimp processing when around 350 inshore, owner-operator fish harvesters gained access to shrimp allocations in the late 1990s. The Labrador Shrimp Company established its plant in the late 1990s in Charlottetown, which provided employment for people in Charlottetown and neighboring communities such as Port Hope Simpson. At the time of our interviews, the plant was supplied by about 20 inshore boats, most based in the region, with crews of 4 or 5 people. SABRI’s plant was also built in the late 1990s and is a joint operation between itself and a large Canadian seafood company. This is a multispecies plant that is geared to processing shrimp and other fish species. The plant employed around 150 people a season in 2012 and had the capacity to process 100,000 pounds of shrimp per day. The construction of Fogo Island’s shrimp plant in the community of Seldom was also supported by special allocation royalties. From the late 1990s, the Fogo Island Co-op lobbied for an offshore allocation of shrimp as a means to build a shrimp plant, upgrade its crab plant, and diversify into other fisheries. The co-op made a strong case for an offshore shrimp quota on the basis of its role in supporting employment and economic development on Fogo Island. It succeeded in 2000 with a 1,000-tonne special allocation, and the shrimp plant was constructed shortly afterward.

In addition to investing income earned from offshore royalties in inshore fisheries development, the three organizations used the royalties for other non-fishery-related economic, social, and cultural activities in their respective communities. A notable example from the perspective of community economies was the establishment of a credit union in Labrador following the relocation in 1984 of the branch office of one of Canada’s largest corporate banks to Deer Lake (on the island of Newfoundland). With local leaders unable to convince the bank to retain a branch in Labrador, the Labrador Shrimp Company helped establish the Eagle River Credit Union, which initially served communities from Cartwright to L’Anse au Clair, the same region that the fishing organization encompassed. Their financial contribution to the new credit union included a start-up investment of $100,000, as well as funds to support the manager’s salary and travel expenses for credit union staff. The Eagle River Credit Union expanded to six branches throughout Labrador, providing loans to its members for building homes, starting small businesses, and buying vehicles. The Credit Union also provides tailor-made loans for harvesters needing finance to upgrade or repair boats (Interviews; Snowadzky 2005).

A second example of an investment geared toward supporting a broad conception of community economy is SABRI’s decision to build a cold storage facility in St Anthony. The facility was built in 2004/2005, providing jobs for local residents and supporting container ships traveling to and from Europe. It is now the province’s second international container port. While the cold storage facility mainly supports offshore factory freezer trawlers, SABRI’s hope is that the facility will also support other goods being transported to and from Europe, including goods associated with resource development in Labrador.

The three organizations in our study also use their royalties to support a wide range of social and community-based activities. These include annual scholarships for students intending to study at a university, support for recreation centers and cultural events including festivals, and support for small business development, especially tourism. These investments have been substantial: By 2010, for example, SABRI had invested $190,000 in student scholarships, $500,000 in community development, and $194,000 in donations to various local initiatives.

The three organizations in the study followed similar strategies in using their resource allocations. Rather than investing in an industrial vessel as other offshore license holders had done in the fishery, the organizations engaged private companies to catch their quota in return for royalties. These funds were then used to diversify local fisheries, to create jobs for fishers on offshore vessels and for plant workers, and to invest in upgrading and new infrastructure. In addition, funds were used to support local social and cultural initiatives and efforts to diversify local economies. In this way, some of the wealth generated from offshore fishing—which has relatively little direct local impact aside from limited employment opportunities—is being diverted to support not only inshore fishing and processing but also community development and well-being in this remote part of North America.

Diverse Resource Distribution for Community Economies?

The preceding analysis has focused on the Canadian state’s allocation of an important fish resource—northern shrimp—to three communities and their respective community-based organizations in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. The community-based organizations used royalties to support inshore fisheries and processing capacity, which in turn generated economic opportunities and jobs. Royalties were also used to support non-fisheries-based economic activity, as well as a wide range of social and cultural activities. In this way, the shrimp allocations played a key role in the economic and social sustainability of these remote coastal places, especially in the wake of devastating groundfish moratoria of the early 1990s.

If community use rights in this study, and in others (Mansfield 2007; Langdon 2008), appear to play a positive role in the sustainability of coastal communities, why do fisheries managers in industrialized countries snub this form of resource allocation? This seems to be the case even when resource allocation policies allow for community use rights. In the United States, for example, the recently implemented catch share policy allows for community use rights by cooperatives and community fisheries associations. Yet in practice, access to fish resources is almost always granted to individuals; indeed, since the U.S. catch share policy was introduced in late 2000s there has not been a single “share” allocated to community fishery associations (Stoll and Holliday 2014). Part of the answer to the question of why fisheries managers refuse to implement community use rights is that most fisheries policy in the industrialized world continues to be guided by a powerful discourse that draws a direct link between economic efficiency and individual and transferable use rights. In other words, economic efficiency (and ecological sustainability), in the mind of mainstream fisheries managers, and the economists who advise them, is only possible through rights that are privatized and commodified.

Such deeply entrenched discourses on property and economy within fisheries management have been difficult to unsettle. For instance, Macinko (2013) argues that even though the U.S. catch share policy provides for a wide range of potential beneficiaries, fisheries managers in the western Pacific (a region that has a tradition of community use rights) and elsewhere continue to be guided by narrow policy options focused on individual use rights. In practice, Macinko (2013, 4) writes, fisheries managers are denying “the very flexibility or adaptability promised by the generic concept of catch share.” Fisheries management, according to Macinko and others, appears to be narrowing in terms of its policy options. This narrowing means that innovative resource allocation regimes— such as community use rights—are rarely considered to be viable; instead, they are displaced outside of the normal economy.

One way of challenging the discourse on the efficiency of commodified property rights is to highlight cases like ours, and others in places like Alaska, where community use rights have provided the basis for regional economic development and job creation in coastal fisheries dependent communities. The purpose of our analysis is to combine new knowledge of community use rights with the insights of the Gibson-Graham diverse economies to open up the possibilities for diverse economic futures. This opening up of possibility and potential does not require imagining some radically different future. Instead, it is achieved by recognizing the already existing diversity of economic forms and practices. Once these diverse practices are recognized, the economy itself is reframed as a “space of possibility” (Gibson-Graham et al. 2013). In fisheries resource management—and perhaps other resource allocation regimes—there appears to be an urgent need for reframing.

Conclusion: Community Economies in Resource-Dependent Regions

This article provides another empirical example to a growing body of literature in geography, political ecology, and, increasingly, human dimensions of resource management that questions the powerful neoclassical discourse and narrow mainstream managerial logics in commercial fisheries. Like work by others (St Martin 2005; McCay 2011; Olson 2011; Pinkerton and Davis 2015), the article demonstrates what stands to be missed if small-scale and local fishing operations are understood to exist at the opposite end of the spectrum from “modern” and/or “industrial” operations with the potential to contribute to the wealth and well-being of coastal communities. The overall contribution of our analysis is to demonstrate how fisheries resources can become ethical spaces of decision where policymakers can establish secure community use rights, which in turn can support diverse institutional forms and practices of community economies.

The analysis thus provides a twofold contribution. First, decisions around resource allocation and use can be guided by ethical considerations. In our example, these decisions started with the decision by DFO Minister Roméo LeBlanc in the late 1970s to allocate significant resources to community-based organizations and cooperatives, and continues with more recent allocations to collections of communities and inshore harvesters affected by the collapse in groundfish in Newfoundland and Labrador. Our analysis also reveals how community-based organization can use ethical decision-making structures to direct the surplus from resource allocations toward supporting regional economic and social development in places that suffered enormously from what remains one of the most significant and disruptive ecological crises the world has seen. In this way, community use rights are neither marginal nor “uneconomic”—but are instead politically possible and economically productive ways of sustaining coastal communities. The analysis suggests that community use rights should not be relegated to the margins of fisheries management policy, but should instead be recognized as an effective way of generating employment and wealth in coastal communities. In this way our work has hopefully made community use rights “more ‘real’, more credible, more viable as objects of policy and activism” (Gibson-Graham 2008, 618).

Our second contribution is to bring Gibson-Graham’s theoretical work into conversation with writing on fisheries resource policies. Their framework provides analytical tools to move beyond the singular conception of a particular type of resource allocation and its assumed economic outcomes. In mainstream resource management, individual transferable property rights are seen as the only rational, economically efficient, and sustainable way of allocating natural resources. Community use rights, in stark contrast, are normally regarded as appropriate for resources that are imbued with culture (i.e., ceremonial uses of fish) or where harvested fish is consumed locally. Our analysis points to a link between community use rights—that are defined and secure—and the practices associated with community economies. In this way, our analysis challenges the link between individual and commodified use rights and efficiency by suggesting that alternative resource management policies can be the foundation for the economic and social sustainability of resource-dependent communities. In making a case for community use rights that are productive and that generate employment and wealth, we seek to bring this form of ethical allocation, and the potential diversity of institutional innovation it can support, to the center of fisheries resource management policy in particular and of resource management more generally. We have hopefully, as Gibson-Graham (2008, 615) have argued, pried “open the ossified view of economic subjects and sectors and allow for new actors to enter conversations about sustainable resource use, resource rights and community economic development.”

Acknowledgments

We thank David Decker and Marc Allain for their important input into the research. We especially thank the 54 interviewees in Newfoundland and Labrador for their extremely generous commitment of time and engagement. Thanks to three anonymous referees for their very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article, and to Barbara Neis for her ongoing support of our research on northern shrimp.

Notes

¹The total number of offshore shrimp licenses in Canada is 17.

²The third license in Labrador was allocated to Torngat Fisheries Cooperative.