The Social Implications of Rights-Based Fisheries Management in New Zealand for Some Hauraki Gulf Fishermen and their Communities

Abstract

This dissertation examines the social implications of a neoliberal `rights-based‘, fisheries management system introduced in New Zealand on 1 October 1986 in the form of the Quota Management System (QMS) using Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs). Ongoing biological and economic monitoring has endeavoured to ensure the status of fish and the well-being of the industry but relatively little social research on the fishermen and their communities. This thesis begins to address this discrepancy. It considers four ―components, The Fishing, now Seafood, Industry (corporates), Fisheries Management (MAF/MFish), which have more market and national perspectives respectively, often influenced by international considerations, while social implications impinge more particularly on Fishermen and their Communities, both generally having more local perspectives. Communities, mainly Waiheke Island (my own community) but with reference to Coromandel, and Leigh, that had been active in the Hauraki Gulf snapper fishery before the QMS, were selected, initially as case studies but later as less distinctive variants. The dissertation argues that permitting the `Big Boats‘ on the coast constructed a crisis which was aggravated by loan schemes. The exclusion of the part-timers and aggregation of quota to the corporates has deprived coastal communities. Once they had access to fish through rights of propinquity and usufruct for livelihood and food. Now access to fish is commodified and controlled by corporates supplying an international market. Some fishermen retained their own quota, are passionate and debt free: others are contractors and financially marginal so that what was once an expressive vocation is now a more instrumental and in many cases marginal job. For social justice the QMS must provide better livelihoods for fishermen and better access to fresh locally caught fish at a fair affordable price for local consumers, especially in coastal communities.