Solutions to the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’: Sea-urchin Management in St Lucia, West Indies

Abstract

Possible solutions to the commons problem have rarely been investigated systematically by the use of biological data on the status and sustainability of the resource. The edible White-spined Sea-urchin (Tripneustes ventricosus) resource of St Lucia, West Indies, is highly prized and vulnerable to exploitation, as is indicated by recent declines in its stocks. In the south-east of St Lucia the resource was almost entirely depleted in an area in which access was free and open. It was not depleted in the other two areas in which there were access controls. In one case, the area was under government control as a marine reserve; in the other, there was a locally practised ‘closed season’ and community-based management of access into a bay.The results of our study indicated that both government controls and informal, community-level controls can lead to successful resource-management outcomes. These findings challenge the ‘conventional wisdom’ that commonly-owned resources are destined to be overexploited.