Small-scale fisheries off the coasts of developing countries are a prime example of the important role that institutions (formal or informal) play in creating wealth and shaping development outcomes in rural communities. Small-scale fisheries are known to employ the majority of world fishers and to provide food and livelihoods to a vast number of people living in coastal areas. Approximately 90 percent of the 38 million people recorded by the FAO globally as fishermen are classified as small-scale (FAO, 2008). Yet they frequently suffer from overfishing and institutional reforms that have worked well in many developed countries are poorly suited to institutional contexts characterized by weak state capacity and poor enforcement. Given the need for local monitoring and enforcement combined with relatively weak state institutions, many countries and donor agencies have turned to co-management schemes, which devolve some responsibilities for management from central governments to local communities. As of 2011, an estimated 130 fisheries in 44 countries were co-managed but evidence on the effectiveness of these systems is mixed (Cinner et al., 2012; Gutierrez et al., 2011).
In Tanzania and other Lake Victoria adjacent countries, co-management has been structured around village-level institutions known as beach management units (BMUs). BMUs play a key role in certain management tasks, including monitoring fishing catches, endorsing fishing permits, and administering other national policies on illegal gear. Against this policy backdrop, we study the conditions that foster improved common-pool resource management in small-scale fisheries in rural Tanzania. In particular, we focus on the critical role that BMUs play in monitoring and enforcing the use of only certain types of gear. We design and implement an artefactual field experiment with fishermen in a randomly selected group of BMUs. Groups of five fishers play a dynamic common-pool resource game carefully designed to mirror the real world characteristics of the fishers’ lives, including on fish stock size, harvest strategies, and opportunities to engage in illegal behavior. By altering features of the game when played with different groups, we generate experimental variation in the possibility of punishment when engaging in “illegal” behavior and study how this institutional feature affects behavior and fishery-level outcomes. Differing from the existing literature, our results show that participants in the monitoring and enforcement game harvest at significantly higher levels than those in the control group. Fishing groups in the enforcement treatment were 50 percent more likely to completely deplete and collapse the resource. Importantly, these outcomes are not driven either by higher cheating (which is never more than 8 percent in either arm of the experiment) nor by actual punishment (which happens only once in all groups across all villages). Instead, the possibility of enforcement induces individuals to harvest during each round at significantly higher rates than in the comparison group. Our experimental results with actual resource users suggest that institutional reforms that target specific behaviors when agents are simultaneously making multiple self-interested or cooperative choices may result in unintended consequences for both the group of resource users and for the resource itself.
