Contract and sustain: evaluating the results of progressive implementation of limited entry and catch shares in West Coast and Alaska Fisheries over four decades Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences

Access to West Coast and Alaskan fisheries has been progressively tightened for more than four decades with limited license programs, buybacks, and catch share programs. We document the implementation of a series of limited access and catch share programs in federally and state managed fisheries of the West Coast and Alaska, and evaluate trends in participation, diversification, vessel revenue, and variation of revenue between 1981 and 2022 for this large interconnected system of fisheries. Over time, progressive tightening through further input controls, buybacks, and catch shares led to substantial consolidation and greater specialization coinciding with increased temporal diversification, maintained or increased revenue per vessel, and reduced variation in inter-annual revenue. However, low levels of fishery diversification for many fishers, and high dependency on a few key fisheries, may have left fishers vulnerable to ecological and economic shocks that impacted key fisheries leading to increased income variation and further declines in participation in recent years.