摘要：Fishing cooperatives (co-ops) and patron-client relationships are the most common cooperative and noncooperativestrategies for self-governance for small-scale fisheries around the world. We studied what drives fishers to choose between thesetwo self-governance arrangements in 12 communities in the Gulf of California, Mexico. The communities depend on similarfishing resources, are located in contiguous portions of the coast, fish roughly the same species, have similar socioeconomiccharacteristics, and sell to similar markets, yet half of the fisheries are organized around co-ops and the other half work throughpatron-client arrangements. Using participant observation, in-depth interviews of key informants between 1995-2008, and asurvey of 55% of the fisheries in the study area, we found that the presence of high transaction costs of commercialization, thedesire to acquire fishing licenses, and the existence of traditions of successful collective action among fishing groups withineach community strongly influence fishers' choices regarding membership in fishing co-ops. We also examined the implicationsof our findings for conservation of fishing resources. Given that the emergence of co-ops was associated with high transactioncosts of commercialization, we hypothesize that cooperative strategies are more likely than patron-client strategies to emergein communities in isolated locations. In an era of globalization, in which the rate of development and urbanization will increasein coastal areas, patron-client strategies are likely to become more prevalent among fisheries, but such self-governance strategiesare thought to be less conducive to conservation behaviors
关键词：commercialization; fishing cooperatives; Gulf of California fisheries; location and co-op choice; resource;stewardship; self-governance; small-scale fisheries
