Community Fisheries Management Handbook - Saint Mary's University

External Recognition
The community’s collective attachment legitimizes claims for any special
status or recognition, which is why it is the basis for more formal recognition
of collective attachment.
Fishing organizations, aboriginal Band Councils, or similar institutions often
take the lead in trying to obtain recognition of a collective attachment
to a fishery. Some strategies used:
Court challenges to existing management systems
Rallies, protests, civil disobedience
Mediation, negotiation, and compromise
Developing management plans and presenting them to the government
Advocacy, networking, media campaigns
Legal instruments
Legal instruments are ways in which government agencies can recognize
and legalize collective attachment to a fishery. This gives communities the
security necessary to invest in community-based management. Legal recognition
can also help communities in enforcing their own fisheries rules
(see Chapter 4: Enforcement and Compliance).
Some communities decide to proceed with community-based fisheries
management without any legal instruments to back them up because:
they are impatient with the slow pace of working through a government
process
they do not believe government will do anything for them
they do not recognize federal or state authority to regulate their fishery
(this may be often the case in aboriginal communities)
The means by which governments recognize (and legalize) collective attachment
to a fishery will vary from place to place. In fisheries management
regimes with centralized management, community access has to be
negotiated in creative ways.
There are more options for formally recognizing community access in
jurisdictions with decentralized fisheries management. Local regulatory
agencies can often be more flexible in granting long term access to a community
than a centralized agency.
Legal tools that can be used to formally recognize collective access
include:
Aboriginal Treaty Rights
Joint Partnership Agreements
Legal Contracts
Communal Licenses
Management Boards
Terms of Reference
Sectoral Allocations
Some legal tools used to formalize collective attachment:
Treaty Rights: Treaties are legal contracts between sovereign nations.
The early European settlers negotiated Treaties between many of the Indigenous
People’s of North America and the European nations. These
Treaties remain valid today and are increasingly being recognized by Federal
courts. The Treaties typically specified that aboriginal people have the
right to access the natural resources on which they traditionally relied.
Over the centuries, many Treaties have been ignored and aboriginal people
have often been denied access to natural resource activities. Since the
late 1980s, however, Canadian Supreme Court judges have been ruling in
favour of First Nations that bring the Federal and Provincial governments
to Court for recognition of their Treaty Rights. The 1999 Marshall decision,
which recognizes the Treaty right of the members of the Mi’kmaq,
Passamaquoddy, and Maliseet First Nations to participate in commercial
fisheries in the Maritimes, legitimizes collective access.
Joint Partnership Agreements: Joint Partnership Agreements (JPAs) are
long term agreements between the Canadian Minister of Fisheries and
Oceans and a particular sector or fleet. These agreements outline the roles
and responsibilities of each party to achieve mutually agreed upon management
activities. They often give a great deal of responsibility for research,
harvest planning, compliance, and self-governance to a fishing fleet. JPAs
can be a powerful tool for getting long-term exclusive access, and management
responsibility over a particular resource.
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