Lobster Management Subject of New Book by UMaine Anthropologist
Contact: James Acheson, Dept. of Anthropology, 207-581-1898; Nick Houtman, Dept. of Public Affairs, 207-581-3777
ORONO, Maine — When Jim Acheson was preparing to write his classic book, The Lobster Gangs of Maine (1988, University of New England Press), he spent a year living in a lobstering community. For several days, he lived with a family to observe their daily routine. He spent days on the docks and at sea talking with lobstermen and documenting their work habits.
Now, Acheson, University of Maine professor of anthropology and marine sciences, has turned his analysis of the lobster industry to the practice and theory of natural resource management in his new book, Capturing the Commons: Devising Institutions to Manage the Maine Lobster Industry.
Also published by University of New England Press, Capturing the Commons discusses steps taken by the industry to develop formal and informal management rules. For this purpose, he continued to listen to lobstermen, but he has shifted the primary focus of his research from the docks to the meetings of regional lobster management zone councils as well as state and federal fishery agencies. The result is a look at the politics of Maine’s most famous crustacean.
At the heart of Capturing the Commons is an analysis of the zone councils as the latest step in more than a century of harvest management efforts. The lobster zone management system is one of the first efforts in the world to allow fishermen to exercise meaningful responsibility for the rules that govern a commercial fishery.
Over the past century, the lobster industry has lobbied the legislature for size limits, local seasonal restrictions, a prohibition on taking egg-bearing lobsters and the V-notch program that protects lobster brood stock. Today, harvests continue at all time highs, and Acheson uses the industry’s experience to probe the conditions under which people will constrain their own exploitation of a natural resource to promote sustainability.
“Those concerned with the lobster fishery have worked hard to maintain the fishery for themselves and future generations,” Acheson writes in his introduction. “To this end they have developed several different kinds of rules to limit access to the resource and to control the fishery, a common-pool resource. They are truly ‘capturing the commons.'”
Maine lobster stands out as an exception in a world where fisheries are in trouble from the Gulf of Maine to Asia. Social scientists have come up with a variety of theories about how political institutions evolve, and Acheson concludes his analysis with a look at how the Maine lobster case extends this body of theory.
Support for Acheson’s research was provided primarily by the Maine Sea Grant Program and the National Science Foundation with additional assistance from the Maine Department of Maine Resources, the Lobster Institute at UMaine and the National Marine Fisheries Service.
The book is available from the University Press of New England, www.upne.org.