Last week I wrote about Elinor Ostrom, and two commenters made great points: neil maclean asked for a concrete example of a well-run commons. Tyner🔸 asked whether “local control” is just a polite way of saying “insiders keeping outsiders out”. Turns out there’s a case study that answers both!
In the early 1900s, Maine’s lobster fisheries were heading towards a textbook tragedy of the commons. The invention of canning in the mid 1800s suddenly allowed lobster of any size (and reproductive age) to be caught and sold far beyond the demands of the local community, decimating the previously abundant lobster populations. Classic Moloch stuff.
And yet one hundred years later, the Maine lobster is now one of the great fisheries success stories.
How?
Formal and Informal Enforcement
Part of the solution came from above: the state introduced formal laws that strictly enforced size limits (restricting the harvest of both small pre-reproductive, and large hyper-spawning females).
But arguably the biggest impact came from the community itself: anthropologist James Acheson spent about fifteen years studying Maine’s lobstering communities, and found that each harbour had its own “gang”: a tight network of local families who claimed specific stretches of water as their own. Those borders weren’t written down anywhere, nor did the state formally recognise them.
But the locals sure did… and if you broke the rules, shit would quickly get real… first would be gossip, then cold-shoulders and icy stares at the dock. If you still didn’t get the message, next thing you know, your traps are cut loose, and your equipment mysteriously sinks. Oh and good luck getting rescued when your boat next breaks down….
These are Ostrom’s design principles to a tee: boundaries and rules made by the people directly reliant on the resource, using a peer-network of monitoring, and graduated sanctions that start out gentle but reliably escalate as infractions grow.
And they were largely a win-win too: Acheson’s data showed the gang-system didn’t just help the lobster ecosystem; it also helped the fishermen too, as better-defended territories tended to grow bigger lobsters, and in some cases higher catches per trap too.
But the trouble with gangs…
At the same time, the instinct of “local control” being just a polite way of saying “keep those damn outsiders out” is largely correct. No matter how successful their conservationism, these gangs can hardly be called “inclusive”. Newcomers are routinely frozen out, which may be the unavoidable downside of informal management.
Feuds can also get nasty. A 2009 feud on Matinicus Island ended with a lobsterman literally being shot in the neck. Admittedly, this was probably a downstream consequence of the 2008 crash + recession, but it makes you wonder how many other Godfather style events go on behind the scenes.
So it’s fair to say that informal enforcement is not rainbows and kittens. Things can turn ugly, especially in tough times. And when that happens, the state invariably has to step in.
Takeaway
So the lesson here isn’t that “local always good; outsiders always bad”.
It’s that the best systems are nested. Maine’s success was its hybrid model: the state set the floor via licences, size limits, trap caps etc, but the locals were also free to add on their own layers of iterative enforcement.
Which is exactly what Ostrom meant by polycentric governance: layers that work together to moderate one another, so that no single system of rules (or lack of rules) can become too entrenched.
Agree/Disagree with this analysis? Rip it apart below ;-)
Also pls share other examples of successful governance have you seen! Inspiration always very welcome.
Sources: Acheson, The Lobster Gangs of Maine · YES! on lobster gangs and the commons · Perry, Maine Law, on fragility under stress · Soundings on the Matinicus shooting