Operational tools and adaptive management

ent, i.e. E ) 0 . If an aim is to maximise effort for a given harvest level then effort less
( M
j
than this level will provide negative utility because all employment possibilities is not
exhausted in the fishery. Hence, a proxy for the social interest (SOC) might be
M
( E j E j ) , (5)
This proxy implies that effort lower than the maximal level enters the objective function with
a negative sign, whereas effort beyond the maximal level enters the objective function with a
positive sign. The latter might seem strange, as this indicates effort levels for which the
resource rent is negative. On the other hand, many present fisheries operate at this scale
surviving only thanks to indirect subsidies and continual restructuring. From a societal
perspective, though not from an economic and environmental, this has a positive impact.
The objective function for each of the four interest groups, EU-authorities, national
authorities, fishers, and NGOs, can now be expressed as follows:
U
U
g
F
g
1
F
1
F(
x)
F(
x)
NqxE
qxE
j
j
F
2
g
2
pqxE
pqxE
j
j
aE
aE
2
j
2
j
F
3
g
3
( E
E
j
j
E
E
M
j
M
j
)
g
EU,
MS,
NGO
N is the number of member states participating in the fishery. All interest groups except the
fishers take into account the total harvest on a stock, which is the aggregate of all member
states harvest. We assume myopic fishers, which mean that they only take into account
national fishers harvest on a specific stock x. Though being a super ordinate authority we
assume that the EU optimises the effort for each member state (and thus for all member states,
as we have assumed homogenous member states). National authorities (MS=member states)
and the fishers (F) care only about the resource rent to the national fishers participating in the
specific fishery. NGOs can be either international, e.g. Greenpeace, or national, e.g. Norges
Naturvernforbund, and as a point of departure we have assumed national NGOs, which
mainly take national resource rent and employment into consideration. For an NGO it might
very well be the case that they only hold environmental interests, which implies
NGO
2
NGO
3
0 .
The national authorities in different member states may diverge when it comes to the weight
of the interests, and the same is true for fishers. As a point of departure, and to keep things
simple, we start out by assuming homogenous member states and fishers, i.e. one
representative national authority and one representative fisher.
Often, there will be a relationship between effort and harvest and/or effort and harvest costs,
which is known only to the fishers, and not to the other three interest groups. This type of
asymmetric information can be introduced in different ways, e.g. by a stochastic term with an
expectation only known to the fishers, or by assuming that q or a is private information to the
fishers. As a first approach to the analysis of agency drift and optimal regulations (incentive
scheme) we assume symmetric and complete information.
The variable the authorities seek to control is effort executed by the fishers. The pay off,
expressed by the nominal value of the objective functions, to an actor regarding her/his social
(6)
(7)
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