Individuals
have privileges but no rights in using the resource (Bromley
1989). Since most outsiders had no economic dependence
on the Lagoon’s resources, they had no economic incentives
to use large mesh nets or to prevent overfishing. In the
face of an open-access system where anyone holding a
professional fishing license could fish, local fishers, both
full-timers and part-timers, also had no social or economic
incentive to use large meshes and prevent overfishing. In
addition, there were also some profit-maximizing local
fishers whose private interests dismissed all possible social
goals, and whose implied rate of time preference was
sufficiently high to shrink future earning streams from a
sustained shrimp stock.