Efficient and sustainable management of shared fisheries in Thailand: Self-governance or regulation?

Artisanal fisheries are significant for poverty alleviation, but they are severely threatened by overfishing and climate change effects. Governance solutions can be hard to find when their implementation and success depend on both social and ecological contexts. In this study, we aim to increase our understanding of behavioral strategies adopted by artisanal fisheries under different types of governance scenarios using a field experiment in the form of a dynamic common-pool resource game with 540 artisanal fishers in Nakorn Si Thammarat province, Thailand. We find that: (i) a quota treatment provides higher overall efficiency and leads to more sustainable management compared to the treatment with an unregulated fishery; (ii) a higher probability of punishment in the quota treatment promotes more equal sharing of payoffs compared to a quota treatment with a low probability of punishment; but that (iii) a higher probability of punishment in the quota treatment is associated with more depletion compared to the case with a low probability of punishment. We hypothesize that under a high probability of punishment governance regime, fishers may leave monitoring to the external authority and shift the focus of their cooperation to a mutual noncompliance with the regulation. Our results suggest that the community empowerment in these artisanal fishery communities is not strong enough to make fishers cooperate effectively without regulation and that a quota system may be one plausible solution. Our results also suggest, however, that the design of the monitoring and punishment systems may need careful consideration to ensure a sustainable solution.