ownership at sea: fishing territories and access to sea resources

By showing that small‐scale fishermen practice a number of forms of self‐regulation, among them some that many have referred to as “property” at sea, anthropologists have challenged the assumptions of the “tragedy of the commons” model—that unregulated harvesting of a common‐property resource is the cause of depletion of sea resources. Some have been inspired by ecological models of territoriality developed to explain the behavior of human foragers. We argue that rules of access to sea resources can only be understood in the context of the total socioeconomic system of which they form a part, including its land‐based component. We also suggest that while the concept of ownership does apply to some forms of sea tenure, the extension of the concept to include informal rules of access is obfuscatory. [fishing, ownership, sea tenure, ecology, states]