Rights to Fish and Rights to Manage: A Note on the Portuguese Fisheries Case

Abstract

Rights Based Management schemes have already been experimented in some specific fisheries and localizations. These experiences have a lot of teaching results about good practices of sustainable management but, also, about the limitations and risks of these tools.The aim of this paper is to evaluate the Portuguese experience with RBM. Our analysis highlights the participatory approach that is developed in the case of sardine fisheries, a proposal of management regime that is very interesting in the sense that it is not possible to talk strictly of rights to fish but, better, in “rights to manage”.