 Great, okay. Thank you. Well, first of all, um, it's impossibly unfair to follow Lanta. He's both more charismatic and Significantly more knowledgeable than I am so apologies that that that I come next But I'm gonna talk a little bit about a project. I did in Fiji That looks at legal reforms regarding collective ownership over the fisheries there so the project Examined reforms that strengthened collective ownership rights over fisheries in Fiji There's a number of elements of the project some of it was qualitative and some of it was quantitative it's I focus specifically on the relationship between institutional reforms and livelihoods I'm putting aside the related issue of ecosystem conservation although I'll touch on that as well And it's actually quite interesting part of the story Because the welfare improvements the hypothesized or expected welfare improvements that we would imagine or would hope Would accrue to the households that were part of the collective ownership units are the lynchpin of the insert internal incentives that that would allow these collective ownership institutions to Sustain and to endure I'm gonna discuss that theoretical issue in greater detail in a few minutes, but Just let me Put a little all of this in perspective. So, you know why Fiji, right? I get that a lot and yes There's it's a beautiful place to do some fieldwork, but it's it's not just a marginal anomalous case globally over 300 million members of 6,000 indigenous groups hold land and other resources communally in accordance with customary law The other aspect of this study looked really carefully at the interaction between formal state law and informal social norms in a given political context and that's where I think this project Articulates most directly with Lance discussion and presentation so the insights from this project are relevant to poverty reduction environment sustainability and prevention of violent conflict from Africa to Asia to Latin America far beyond the borders of my archipelago That I had the good fortune to spend some time So Fiji what was going on in Fiji? What's the context? Ethnic Fijians hold traditional clan based rights over 411 inshore reef fishing grounds called goalie goalies Goldie goalie Translates from Fijian literally as customary fishing grounds these customary rights were established Informal state law by the fisheries Act of 1941 but were but that act was designed to Translate into state law already existing informal norms around the distribution of fishery rights So what are these rights? They are rights that accrue to each individual member of the clan as Part and parcel of group membership. They're not alienable. They're not transferable They belong to the clan group in whole Imperpetuity and are indivisibly tied to place So that's what we're talking about when we're talking about coming collective ownership over the fisheries So what what are the big questions that we're looking at here in this study just First by way of background I think it's important to clarify from the outset that collective ownership is not the absence of property rights There are three different types of property rights regimes private property which vests Control the right to use the right to sell in a single owner Open access which is equivalent to essentially a no property regime and often is often conflated with collective ownership It is quite distinct and then the situation. We're looking at here, which is characterized by clearly defined boundaries community level choice arrangements That's really the informal norms of resource governance and the internal monitoring and rule compliance Buy it for and against group members So here I'm building on a quite a bit of extensive previous work, which should be familiar to most of you Which is analyze the internal dynamics of collective ownership institutions Arguing that such institutions but can in some circumstances Better govern common pool resources than either private or state ownership This research has posited that collective ownership of common pool resources can be more conducive to Efficient resource use and more effectively accrue benefits to the resource owners then either private or state ownership And this is a position. It's quite interesting Which opposes the significant body of legal and economic scholarship arguing that well-enforced Private property rights are necessary for trade credit access and efficient levels of resource investment This work the the commons work also opposes the equally Influential theories around public good provision arguing that state Provision is required for public goods with total social benefits greater than the gains enjoyed by any single individual so Again, articulating with with Lance discussion in what we're looking at here is countries with limited institutional capacity where state regulation is Inefficient or ineffective in preventing exploitation of common pool resources, you know, and why might that be the case? It might be that the government agents charge with monitoring fishing are taking bribes They don't care whether the fish are fished or not But they're gonna pocket the the benefits to them for turning a blind eye So this is the bribe taking a principal agent problem So That's that's where the recent that's where much of the resource research on this issue has has focused But there's been very little and at all I mean they almost know empirical work regarding the actual impact of stronger collective ownership rights on household welfare And because the welfare improvements enjoyed by group members from stronger collective ownership Institutions are what allows these institutions to to endure the project aims to fill that research gap the other aspect of this work regard Aim to look at the reciprocal relationship between internal and formal governance Mechanisms and the internal Institutional context and how these normative orders constitute each other in reciprocal relationship So some possibilities It could be that stronger collective ownership rights could improve household welfare either through an efficiency pathway or transfer pathway On the other hand these state legal reforms could actually have no effect And why could they have no effect multiple reasons could be due to internal governance failures It could be due to failures in enforcement by the state So there's a lot of unanswered questions about about mechanisms, and I think you know we have to acknowledge that but Want to jump into how the project was structured and what I did so there's a qualitative component and key informant interviews with political leaders villagers NGO workers There was an ethnographic case study of one village on you knew the island I lived there for four months actually a lot of fun and stay on this village and then also secondary sources And then ongoing visits to Fiji over a two-year period with interviews with lots of different stakeholders The quantitative aspect of the study was looking really carefully at one reform Implemented in 2003 in an area in the north of Fiji called Makawata province So these provincial leaders at the urging of external environmental NGOs and National ethnic Fijian leaders strengthened village level collective ownership rights over the goalie goalies within their province So this study it was conducted six years after these reforms and compared three neighboring villages in Makawata two villages one was Kavua and the other is Druida and There's some very interesting variation there one had an NGO that was Very engaged in project implementation the other did not and then in Bua, which was just the neighboring province Sixth in the village called Galoa 60 miles away Was not affected by the the institutional reforms and so what did these reforms look like? What what were they? I included greater autonomy for villagers in setting resource use rules inside their goalie goalie Strengthened police assistance to villagers in guarding against encroachment and in enforcing goalie goalie rules So collected data household surveys in these in these three villages Just very quickly. It's a you know pretty simple model but I think one thing Deserves a bit of attention, which is the dependent variable in addition to household income I also looked at two proxies for subsistence welfare One being the rate of fresh food consumption and the other the rate of canned food consumption because they these are all subsistence Villages there's they've essentially had no monetary income or very very little So it'd be a very surprising to see any impact on on the income aspect, but they did have pretty significant variance in terms of Whether or not they were eating spam. That was their primary substitute for fresh fish And so that that was a very actually quite useful proxy and built on the quantity and built on the the ethnographic work that I had done that you Recognize that that was what was a much bigger reflection of Whether or not they were the villagers were seeing benefits from their fishery and some of the controls number of household members education age of male and female household heads and membership in the chief's family and Use two models of clustered robust standard errors and bootstrapped standard errors So I know I'm jumping around a lot because this was a really Rich study and had I'm trying to get through as quickly as possible both the qualitative and the quantitative work which Are quite interesting in conversation with each other So let me just forgive me if it feels a little bit disjointed and hopefully I'll be able to circle back around and tie them together as we move through So the first really I think very interesting piece of finding on this project I Concerned the relationship between the intersection of formal law and informal social norms in the political context and Given the pre-existing informal norms and Fiji's legal context and the political dynamics Strengthening collective ownership rights over fisheries has been pursued by environmentalists in Fiji as the most politically viable strategy for promoting marine conservation I Which is quite interesting Because the main agents for this reform process have been the environmental NGOs They really did not care at all about welfare improvements except instrumentally in so far as they could sell these reforms to the ethnic Fijians as as politically viable and politically feasible because it would deliver improved living standards for the communities But actually the environmental NGOs that was a side effect, right? They were concerned about environmental conservation within the fisheries but There is virtually no compelling ecological evidence that these collective ownership units Increase fish stocks or restore ecosystems. Now. Why is that part of it is a small size, okay? so we're talking about collective ownership over relatively small inshore refishing areas not vast swaths of the ocean and These are not self-sustained ecosystems. So it's very I mean frankly, I thought the the sort of the flimsiness of the evidence was Appalling given how many how much resources have been had been devoted to strengthening these collective ownership units in Fiji But really that the problem is that they might be too small There are much of the fishing Incrosion happens because of Japanese land long liners that are fishing off the coast and are not subject to any kind of Informal governance mechanisms by these clan groups can't be stopped in that regard. It's a much bigger problem It's a state level problem also Many marine biologists have hypothesized that there are other threats to marine ecosystem health such as untreated sewage runoff are Just as environmentally harmful if not more environmentally harmful as any kind of overfishing in the area The key instigators of reform the World Wildlife Foundation the World Conservation Society and the fisheries Department of Fiji So these are not development NGOs who are interested primarily in livelihoods They're interested in ecosystem conservation so then Why has strengthening collective ownership rights been the primary institutional reform strategy pursued by these environmental NGOs? So a couple reasons first of all According to Fijian custom their taboo or restricted fishing areas have always long been established after the death of a chief To commemorate a wedding of a high-ranked village member or to mark some other notable event So the idea of establishing No-take marine protected areas within goalie goalies Corresponded directly to already existing customary modalities and so we're very immediately Comprehensible to villagers quick and simple to implement and easily enforced within and through existing customary village governance structures In this regard the concept of marine protected areas fits well with long-standing customary Fijian practices Second of all these reforms Aim to strengthen existing customary collective ownership fishery claims not replace them if you remember I discussed in the beginning that according to the fisheries Act of 1941 you would 411 demarcated fishing grounds so those rights had already been allocated and established So what these reforms did was strengthen these already established rights rather than try to replace them with something different But what else is going on? political power imperatives in Fiji So strengthening collective ownership rights over the goalie goalies is Very central to the political agendas of powerful ethnic Fijians The rights over the goalie goalies have long been a major power struggle in Fiji in 2006 members of Parliament allied with the ethnic Fijian Great Council of Chiefs introduced What was clearly quickly became clear to me? It was an infamous bill called the goalie goalie bill Which attempted to significantly expand goalie goalie rights? Recognize under formal law building on that fisheries Act of 1941 This national level effort to strengthen ethnic Fijian rights precipitated a military coup and this was driven by a fear by Indo Fijians That if enacted the bill would significantly alter the balance of power between ethnic Fijians and other groups And why is that? It's because ethnic Fijians can hold rights to customary fishing grounds by virtue of their membership in their clan So strengthening these customary rights necessarily benefits ethnic Fijians at the direct loss of Indo Fijians who are more than 40% of the Fijian population But because they're not members of a clan with claim to a goalie goalie cannot own these fisheries But although stymied at the parliamentary level these efforts to strengthen ethnic Fijian rights have continued on three Parallel and complementary tracks Ethic Fijians control the Department of Fisheries. So that's been a stronghold of these reform efforts they also dominate a number of provisional government governments including the Makawata Province and Finally some clans have you know Been very supportive of these reforms on their own initiative with support from the conservation NGOs Okay, so this is some of these are things that's the main highlights regarding the constrained terrain of policy reform in Fiji and the relationship between informal norms formal law and the political environment Okay, so then what do we find out you given that there's not all that much evidence that Strengthening collective ownership rights does anything from environmental conservation Does it do anything for household welfare? And so we turn now to the household survey data So some of the main findings are yeah, basically yes Controlling for other variables strengthening collective ownership rights in Fiji through stronger state protection one did increase the consumption of fresh seafood and Reduce the consumption of inferior canned food some substitutes Had no impact on household monetary income without some simultaneous Implementation support from outside NGOs and this is actually was another piece of the study That was quite interesting is that you did see some some impacts on income But only in the village that also had NGO support for implementation And I couldn't trace out pathways, so I you know, I really don't know why those villages saw income improvements just some very sketchy qualitative hypothesis that had much more to do with Job livelihood trainings alternative employment opportunities rather than anything to do with The the legal reforms themselves something would say something more like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle The NGO showed up and they changed the environment in which they were operating so that they found what they were looking for But I have Lots of all the charts I've handed out That's what I passed around People are always putting these charts on their PowerPoints that nobody can read So I instead have put them in your hands and I don't need to walk through that now But I just that the results were quite robust to different model specifications We see rate of fresh seafood consumption much higher in Makawata province then in in Goloa Rate of canned food consumption again higher in Goloa and lower in Makawata province and Then here's the interesting Heisenberg principle results I was talking about where you see the NGO there is The the community where you actually had an NGO operating. It's the only place you saw any kind of income effects So just to to wrap up I think there's some Problems and challenges with this study. I mean There's a causality issue I going to the issue of bureaucratic capacity. There is no time series data Yeah, you know, this is all household surveys that I collected with some Fajian enumerators I tried to get household data and The 2000 census was still sitting in piles of paper on the floor of the Fiji Fijian census bureau When I showed up in 2007. I mean really giant piles of paper I don't think they had opened the books they pointed to the to them They said you can look if you want through the piles of paper sitting in the in the middle of the floor Which I didn't think would be particularly fruitful. So we don't have time series data just across sections So there are remain some some big questions around that The external validity question is always always an issue but it deserves some time to think about because These reforms were relevant particularly in the context of a place that had a political environment where supporting stronger collective ownership rights coincided with the interest of elites Where you had informal governance mechanisms that were already quite strong Expectations regarding how resources were used and how they were monitored that could be easily built upon and reinforced by the state So that the state reforms did not displace but rather complimented existing customary norms and that there already had been in place a formal legal structure that recognized and Protected these customary rights claims and then these reforms are building on and strengthening those existing those existing laws and not displacing them and so just in terms of thinking about legal reforms you know we talk a lot about Context and the central role played by local context in the interaction between formal and informal And so I actually look forward to Michael's firmer further comments on these issues and broader implications