The anatomy of the Maine lobster comanagement law

In fisheries management circles, there is growing interest in comanagement in which authority for managing fish stocks is shared between government agencies and the fishing industry. This article discusses the implementation of the new comanagement system in the Maine lobster industry, which was initiated in 1995. The law has clearly been successful in that lobster fishermen have been able to generate rules to constrain their own exploitive effort. By 1998, all of the management zones had voted for a strict trap limit, and by 2000, four of the seven zones had voted for limited entry rules. At the same time, five different kinds of problems had come to the fore, including several varieties of distributional conflicts, two kinds of constitutional issues, boundary disputes, controversies caused by federal intervention, and problems caused by changes in the scale of management. Not all of these problems were expected, and some have been solved with more success than others.