Abstract:
West Coast fishery management is a product of its context, incentives, and history. The context is both regional and national.
Incentives have encouraged investment and growth. The history is a progression of enclosure, expansion, and eventual
contraction. A major West Coast fishery – groundfish – illustrates how fishery management has evolved in the past half-century.
We can bracket the understanding of this evolution with two time periods – groundfish management in 1999 and its
postwar origins.
