Leadership, Social Capital and Incentives Promote Successful Fisheries

A paper in Nature by Nicolas Gutierrez et al. carries out a meta-analysis of the literature on fisheries management. 130 fisheries are included. The aim was to test whether community co-management can promote sustainability as argued by Ostrom and others. They coded success of the fishery according to number of social, ecological and economic outcomes achieved and also counted the number of various "co-management" attributes associated with each fishery. The results look almost too good to be true:



Above a threshold level of co-management attributes there is a tight linear relationship between the number of success attributes and the number of co-management attributes. It looks almost too good to be true but would be a strong vindication for Ostrom.