Cooperation as a solution to shared resources in territorial use rights in fisheries

Territorial use rights in fisheries (TURFs) are coastal territories assigned to fishermen for the exclusive extraction of marine resources. Recent evidence shows that the incentives that arise from these systems can improve fisheries sustainability. Although research on TURFs has increased in recent years, important questions regarding the social and ecological dynamics underlying their success remain largely unanswered. In particular, in order to create new successful TURFs, it is critical to comprehend how fish movement over different distances affects the development of sustainable fishing practices within a TURF. In theory, excessive spillover outside a TURF will generate incentives to overharvest. However, many TURFs have proven successful even when targeted species move over distances far greater than the TURF's size. A common attribute among some of these successful systems is the presence of inter-TURF cooperation arrangements. This raises the question of how different levels and types of cooperation affect the motivations for overharvesting driven by the movement of fish outside the TURF. In this paper, we examine equilibrium yields under different levels of inter-TURF cooperation (from partial to full) and varying degrees of asymmetry across TURFs of both biological capacity and benefit-sharing. We find that partial cooperation can improve yields even with an unequal distribution of shared benefits and asymmetric carrying capacity. However, cooperation arrangements are unstable if the sharing agreement and biological asymmetries are misaligned. Remarkably, we find that asymmetry in the system can lead to the creation of voluntary no-take zones.