Enforced Economics: Individual Fishery Quota Programs and the Privileging of Economic Science in the Gulf of Mexico Grouper-Tilefish Fishery

Individual Fishery Quota (IFQ) programs allocate shares of an established quota of specific species of fish to individual fishermen based on their history of participation in the fishery, effectively privatizing the fishery even though government agencies maintain the right to alter the shares, species covered, or other attributes of the program. Fishery managers typically use economic arguments about efficiency, planning, and avoiding tragedies of the commons, along with safety issues, to justify IFQ programs, suggesting they professionalize fisheries. Embedded in these arguments is the implication that fishermen have not been using their human, fixed, or other forms of capital efficiently, and that they need to begin thinking more like businessmen—that is, more like neoclassical economists would like them to think. Based on research on the Gulf of Mexico Grouper-Tilefish IFQ program, this article argues that IFQ programs, while encouraging fishermen to behave more like businessmen, do not reflect historical participation in the fisheries of the Gulf.