In a paper published in the 20 June 2011 issue of the journal Sustainability, Rashid Sumaila, director of the Fisheries Economics Research Unit at the University of British Columbia Fishery Centre, and colleagues argue that understanding the socio-economic factors associated with fishers’ willingness to delay gratification may be useful for designing appropriate fisheries management and conservation policies.

In their study, they aimed to identify the predictors of low discounting behavior among fishers, which is analogous to having a longer-term outlook. They based their empirical study on two small-scale tropical reef fisheries in Sabah, Malaysia, and Fiji. They used an experimental approach to identify fishers with low discount rates, and then used a logistic regression model to identify predictors of low discount rates. The team found that 42 percent of the respondents had low discount rates, and that site and village level variables are significant predictors of low discount rates. Within Sabah and Fiji, boat ownership and relative catch differentiate low discounting from non-low discounting fishers, but these variables have contradictory effects in Sabah and Fiji.

Overall, the team’s results imply that a substantial proportion of reef fishers may be willing to engage in conservation initiatives; however, local socio-cultural, economic, and ecological conditions have to be considered first during the process of designing management interventions.

The paper can be found here.