The above conditions are certainly

The above conditions are certainly met in the case of sedentary or slightly mobile resources, such as seaweed and oyster and clam beds, and in the case of resources within well-defined geographical areas such as tidal lands, swamps, self-contained bays, lagoons, and river estuaries. Even with more mobile resources (like crustaceans) and open areas (like coastal waters) there is a possibility of dividing up the resource as long as the fish displacements and migrations between portions are not sufficient to obscure the connection between the “owner's” current actions and his/her future profits.
The revival and rejuvenation of traditional community rights over coastal resources offer, perhaps the best possible management option for scattered, remote, and fluid small-scale fisheries. There are several examples of territorial rights in traditional fisheries in countries as diverse as Brazil, the Ivory Coast, and Sri Lanka. Canoe fishermen operating in a river estuary in Valencia, eastern Brazil, succeeded through a rather complex system of zoning and timing based on the lunar-tide cycle to control internal population pressures and set limits on the intensity of fishing through access limitations, which established fishing as a reliable long-term occupation. Although the resource moved with the tide, the fishermen were able to map out its distribution in time and space and establish “temporary territorial rights which (could be) converted into long-standing territorial claims”.
Competition between different fishing methods was eliminated through the zoning that had matched
fishing methods and fishing grounds according to the effect of the tide cycle on their efficiency. This had a “boat-spacing” effect. Competition between the same type of gear was reduced through the selection of fishing spots (which had both a spatial and a temporal dimension) by individual captains on the basis of their knowledge of the tide movements and the fishing grounds. Although it was not unlikely for two or more captains to select the same fishing spot, the first to reach the spot had a temporary territorial claim. In the absence of clear-cut prior claims, lots were drawn. What prevented a common-property type of race for the premium fishing spots was a community ethic for captains to anticipate and avoid competitive encounters in deciding where to fish each day. This resulted in a situation where a limited number of captains owned “chunks of the lunar-tide fishing space,” exercised deliberate control over the “opportunity structure of fishing,” and passed their skills to a limited number
of apprentices. Thus, the fishermen on their own were able to stabilize their production system, set limits on the intensity of fishing, and resolve inter-gear conflicts through a system of temporary territorial claims.
Sri Lankan coastal fisheries have a history of traditional property rights in the form of rights of access and closed communities. In earlier times, beach seine owners controlled the access to coastal waters and had associated fishing rights that, along with other property, were subject to bilateral inheritance (by descent or marriage). Although at the start each beach seine owner had his own beach for which he had exclusive rights to operate, each of his children had only a fraction, not of his beach, but of his right to fish off the beach along with his brothers and brothers-in-law. While there was no limit to the number of nets that anyone holding rights to access could have constructed, the fishermen on a given beach, being a single kinship group, refrained from constructing additional nets unless they could bring in a catch whose value would have been higher than the cost of the net. That is, they acted as a single economic unit.
Sri Lankan coastal fishing villages are generally “closed” communities in the sense that persons from outside the village are not allowed access to the fishing grounds of the community. Outsiders are notallowed to anchor or beach fishing boats along the shoreline of the community, and labor is not recruited from outside the village. These restrictions on entry help to explain why Sri Lankan coastal fishermen, unlike many other small-scale fishermen in Asia, earn incomes appreciably above their opportunity costs.
Another example of the stark contrast between the situation of a fishery under open access and that of a fishery with traditional fishing rights is provided by the case of two lagoon fisheries in the Cote d'Ivoire (S.M. Garcia, pers. comm.). In Lagoon Ebrie near Abidjan, traditional customary rights of fishermen operating fixed gears broke down following the introduction of mobile gears, such as purse seines, by outsiders (mainly town investors). The Ebrie fishery is now overcapitalized and heavily overexploited in both the biological and economic sense, as evidenced by the small size of fish caught and the relatively low incomes of fishermen.
In contrast, the rather isolated fishery of Lagoon Tagba, over 100 kilometers from Abidjan, is still controlled by a limited number of chiefs (fishing team leaders) who have knowledge of the biological features of the resource and are enforcing traditional regulations on mesh size and on fishing in spawning areas. Though several tribes operate on the lagoon, the limited migration of catfish (the main species exploited) permits each community to manage its own portion of the lagoon. In the late 1960s a severe conflict arose between fishermen from neighboring countries and local fishermen