Portuguese Aquaculture: An Anti-common Tragedy?

Abstract

Last decades of the 20th century have shown many problems arisen from the emergence of commons mismanagement and under-defined property rights. In the 80s, Michelman introduced the problem of excessive fragmentation of property rights. A new concept, “anticommons”, was developed to put in evidence some problems seen as the mirror image of traditional “tragedy of the commons”. These problems include the under-use of resources and may come from several sources, including bureaucracy. Buchanan and Yoon stated that the anti-commons construction offers an analytical tool for isolating a central feature of “sometimes disparate institutional structures”. This means that the inefficiencies introduced by “overlapping and intrusive regulatory bureaucracies” may be studied with the help of this conceptualization. There are only few empirical studies on anticommons’ tragedies in the real world, most of them focusing on pharmaceutics industry. The main purpose of this paper is to use this conceptualization to study the design and execution of aquaculture policy in Portugal. The results are consistent with the suggestion of Buchanan and Yoon.