Combining fairness and stability concerns for global commons: The case of East Atlantic and Mediterranean tuna

The paper examines the issue of allocating fishing rights for the management of East Atlantic and Mediterranean tuna. Although it is well-known that fairness plays a crucial role for the acceptability of international environmental agreements, usually there is a trade-off between fairness and stability. Our results confirm such a trade-off between fairness and stability that prevails over international agreements and this paper examines a way to reconcile it. The proposed approach comprises three stages. First, various equitable sharing rules (originated from the “bankruptcy” literature) are used to allocate the fishing rights. Second, fairness and stability criteria are used to assess the eligibility of the examined allocation rules. The final choice is facilitated by using a social choice rule. The chosen rationing rule, namely the A-min, represents a specific weighted average of the two focal rationales in the sharing problems, namely the equal shares and the proportional ones. Setting aside the institutional inertia, the A-min rule dominates, in terms of stability and fairness, the existing rule used by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT). Furthermore, it is a transparent and easy to justify allocation rule so, it may be proved to be a strong candidate for future policy changes concerning the allocation of fishing rights.