Bonnie McCay, Ph.D., Board of Governors Distinguished Professor

GRADUATE CERTIFICATE DIRECTOR

Cook Office Building, Room 207
848-932-9232
mccay@aesop.rutgers.edu

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Biography | Current Research | Selected Publications | Teaching/Taught

Biography

Bonnie McCay is Board of Governors Distinguished Service Professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, in the Department of Human Ecology of the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences. Her graduate training was in environmental anthropology at Columbia University (PhD 1976), and her research and teaching have focused on challenges and policies for managing common pool resources such as fish and shellfish, with particular attention to intersections of ecology, community, and social institutions of science, law and property. She has done field research in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, Canada, in the Middle Atlantic region of the U.S., and in Baja California, Mexico, with funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Sea Grant College Program, the National Park Service, and the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station.

Her books include "The Question of the Commons," "Oyster Wars and the Public Trust," and "Enclosing the Commons." She currently serves on numerous editorial boards and on the Scientific and Statistical Committee of the Mid-Atlantic Fisheries Management Council. Her graduate teaching and mentoring is within the Anthropology, Geography, and Ecology & Evolution programs at Rutgers University.

Biography | Current Research | Selected Publications | Teaching/Taught

Current Research

As a human ecologist, my project is on the many dimensions of human adaptations and mal-adaptations to changes in their environments. Although my theoretical approaches and interests are very broad, my own research, grounded in the methods of cultural anthropology, has focused on marine and coastal ecosystems and communities and the institutional aspects of adapting to and managing commercial fisheries. Current research includes an interdisciplinary study of climate changes and its effects on a major commercial fishery, for Atlantic surfclams, in waters off New Jersey and the larger region, an ethnographic assessment of the Sandy Hook component of Gateway National Recreation Area, and an analysis of gentrification and the fisheries of Fogo Island, Newfoundland.

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Systems and Processes in Fishery-Dependent Communities

I explore the systemic aspects of how people respond to signals of change in marine and coastal environments. Early work in Newfoundland, Canada, then influenced by evolutionary ecology and general systems theory, looked at the roles of powerful interests and government policies in distorting processes of response to fisheries decline. It provided the groundwork for a critique of theory in ecology and anthropology that I developed with A.P. Vayda, where we questioned approaches that assigned agency to systems rather than to the organisms and functional groups within those systems (McCay, 1976; Vayda and McCay, 1975). I later used the term "people ecology" to counter then prevalent notions of "systems ecology" but also to leave open the question of what the units of action actually were, in contrast with socio-biological approaches that emphasized individuals or even genes (McCay, 1978). I applied that approach to my research with commercial fisheries in New Jersey (McCay, 1981), moving a step further toward what is now called "political ecology," emphasizing the limitations of ecological models-including optimal foraging theory-when dealing with situations marked by the exercise of power, conflict, and resistance .

More recent work, comparing fisheries of Newfoundland, New Jersey, and Baja California Sur, Mexico, responds to recent efforts to return to systems approaches, under the rubric of coupled natural and human systems (or "socio-ecological systems") (McCay et al., 2010). In that work I have recycled the ideas of positive and negative feedback that come from systems theory as frameworks for examining the roles of property rights, community, and ecology in the outcomes of human/environmental interactions, another major theme of my research.

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Coupled Natural and Human Systems and Climate Change

Research in both Mexico and the United States in recent years has taken place within the framework of the NSF programs in Biocomplexity and Coupled Natural and Human Systems, very large, inter-institutional and multi-disciplinary projects seeking to develop models for and understanding of complex marine systems that incorporate human dimensions. The question of feedback mentioned above is central to that work, as are questions about property rights and community, addressed below. The new project, of which I am the lead PI, focuses on climate change as it appears to affect a dominant species in the benthos of the Mid-Atlantic region, the surfclam, and how that in turn ripples through the coupled system. As an anthropologist, I am particularly interested in how the system -and scientific models of it-are understood by human actors in the system (owners of fishing businesses, scientists, resource managers, etc.), and how their interpretations interact with other factors (including vulnerability, in the case of industry members) to influence their responses and hence feedback into the system.

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Property Rights, Community, and Ecology

The tragedy of the [open access] commons is perhaps the most influential explanation for environmental problems, parsing commons to mean the absence of secure, individualized property rights, often described as open access. Open access, when applied to common pool resources, leads, it is argued, to dilemmas whereby individual rationality leads to system irrationality. Therefore, either the creation of property rights or control by a central government are necessary to protect common pool resources when demand for them is high. Marine fishing provides numerous and striking examples of the tragic outcomes of open access, as I observed during the 1970s in Newfoundland.

Much of my research has involved efforts to better understand such tragedies, asking questions such as whether there is indeed open access versus formal or informal controls in a fishery; if there is open access, why and on whose behalf; and how people really do respond to signs of decline in the resources on which they depend. With J. Acheson I co-edited a book that brought together case studies of people in commons situations and argued for greater appreciation of the specifics of how individuals, communities, and governments respond (McCay and Acheson, 1987). My work has questioned the naïvete of making generalized causal linkages between kinds of property rights (i.e., public, private, common, and open access) and environmental outcomes, and I joined others in pointing to the potentials for communities of resource users to be meaningfully engaged in managing the commons (Feeny et al., 1990; McCay, 2000). I have also recently cast the issue of ownership of the coastal commons as particularly problematic, given the transitory and liminal nature of both the natural and the socio-cultural dimensions of coastal and marine systems (McCay, 2009a, b).

Research on the human ecology of fisheries has led me to focus on how increased specification of property rights in the commons takes place, in what forms, and to what effects. The most extreme form is the quasi-private property system known as individual transferable quotas (ITQs), similar to cap-and-trade regimes in air pollution, and my colleagues and I have studied variants of ITQ systems of fisheries management in the U.S. and Canada, exploring their socio-economic, political, and management conditions and consequences, e.g., (McCay et al., 1995), as well as the roles of community-linked concerns in resistance to such privatization, e.g., (McCay, 1999) as well as in the design of ITQ systems (McCay, 2004). Another form of increasingly specified property rights in fisheries is the area-based concession, which we have studied in Baja California Sur, Mexico as an example of community-based management of the commons that also relies on co-management with government authorities and scientific experts (Ponce-Diáz et al., 2009). This research area dovetails with emerging national policy for marine resource management, emphasizing both protected area and catch share management.

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Other Research Foci (McCay)

Cumulative effects of environmental and regulatory change. Much of my contract work has been to develop base-line studies of marine fishing communities in the Mid-Atlantic region, to enable social impact analyses of regulatory changes as mandated by federal law. Recently this led to a study of the cumulative effects of regulations, which we have identified as creeping enclosure, or gradual development of restrictions on entry that replicate the effects of outright privatization (Murray et al., 2010).

Social theory, participatory governance, and marine fisheries. With colleagues in Europe and the U.S. I have developed critical perspectives on marine fisheries science and policy, arguing in effect for a more Durkheimian approach that acknowledges the importance of community, sociality, and identity, e.g., (McCay and Jentoft, 1998). Within this framework we have also worked on issues in participatory governance, e.g., (Wilson and McCay, 1998).


Gender, environment, and development. I have long been interested in the roles of gender in fisheries (McCay, 2003), and in recent years I have begun a study of the roles of women in what I call ‘the work of community,’ or the paid and unpaid work that goes into maintaining the social infrastructure of viable communities in the context of economic distress and population decline in Newfoundland fishing communities. This work is being done in cooperation with a local woman, C. Penton, and was reported at a seminar in Newfoundland in October 2009.

Innovations in marine resource management. Research and teaching in both the US and Europe have led to a taxonomy of innovations in marine fisheries management: market-based (ITQs), community-based (i.e., the Mexican concessions), ecosystem-based (including marine protected areas but broader than that) (Lester et al. 2010), and consumer-based (use of eco-certification, for example, to shape consumer responses (McCay and Weisman, 2007).

The production of knowledge for science-based decision-making. Fisheries science has come to depend in part on active participation of fishermen in the process of knowledge creation, through cooperative research programs as well as efforts to document their experience-based knowledge, and one of our NSF projects focused on this (Johnson, 2007). Our current NSF project on climate change and surfclams includes this topic too.

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References Cited

Feeny, D., Fikret Berkes, Bonnie J. McCay, and J. M. Acheson. 1990. The tragedy of the commons : twenty -two years later. Human Ecology, 18:1-19.
Johnson, T. 2007. Integrating Fishermen and Their Knowledge in the Science Policy Process: Case Studies of Cooperative Research in the Northeastern U.S. . Doctoral Dissertation thesis, Rutgers the State University.
McCay, B. J. 1976. Appropriate Technology and Coastal Fishermen of Newfoundland. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms. Doctoral Dissertation thesis, Columbia University.
—. 1978. Systems Ecology, People Ecology, and the Anthropology of Fishing Communities. Human Ecology, 6:397-422.
—. 1981. Optimal Foragers or Political Actors: Ecological Analyses of a New Jersey Fishery. American Ethnologist, 8:356-382.
—. 1999. 'That's Not Right': Resistance to Enclosure in a Newfoundland Crab Fishery. In D. Newell and R. Ommer (eds.), Fishing People, Fishing Places: Issues in Canadian Small-Scale Fisheries, pp. 301-320. University of Toronto Press, Toronto.
—. 2000. Property Rights, The Commons, and Natural Resource Management. In M. D. Kaplowitz (ed.), Property Rights, Economics, and the Environment,, pp. 67-82. JAI Press, Stamford, CT.
—. 2003. Women's rights, community survival, and the fisheries cooperative of Fogo Island. In R. Byron (ed.), Retrenchment and Regeneration in Rural Newfoundland, pp. 158-176. University of Toronto Press, Toronto.
—. 2004. ITQs and Community: An Essay on Environmental Governance. Review of Agricultural and Resource Economics, 33:162-170.
McCay, B. J., and J. M. Acheson. 1987. The Question of the Commons : The Culture and Ecology of Communal Resources. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.
McCay, B. J., and S. Jentoft. 1998. Market or Community Failure? Critical Perspectives on Common Property Research. Human Organization, 57:21-29.
McCay, B. J., Richard Apostle, Carolyn Creed, Alan C. Finlayson, and K. Mikalsen. 1995. Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs) in Canadian and US Fisheries. Ocean and Coastal Management, 28:85-116.
McCay, B. J., and W. Weisman. 2007. Greening the Red Rock Lobster: Ecolabeling and Control in a Mexican Fishery. Paper presented to annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, November 27-December 2, 2007, Washington, D.C. (Session Anthropology and Sustainability: Issues, Outcomes and Experiences in Mexican Fisheries and Coastal Communities, organized by Maria Cruz Torres).
McCay, B. J., W. Weisman, and C. F. Creed. in press. Coping with Environmental Change: Systemic Responses and the Roles of Property and Community in Three Fisheries. In R. Ommer, I. Perry, P. Cury and K. Cochrane (eds.), World Fisheries: A Social-ecological Analysis. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford.
Murray, G., T. Johnson, B. J. McCay, S. Takahashi, and K. St. Martin. 2010. Cumulative effects, creeping enclosure, and the marine commons of New Jersey. International Journal of the Commons, 4:367-389.
Ponce-Diáz, G., W. Weisman, and B. J. McCay. 2009. Co-responsabilidad y participación en el manejo de pesquerías en México: lecciones de Baja California Sur. . Pesca y Conservación, 1:1-9.
Vayda, A. P., and B. J. McCay. 1975. New directions in ecology and ecological anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology, 4:293-306.
Wilson, D. C., and B. J. McCay. 1998. How The Participants Talk About "Participation" in Mid-Atlantic Fisheries Management. Ocean & Coastal Management, 41:41-69.

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Biography | Current Research | Selected Publications | Teaching/Taught

Selected Publications

• Murray, G., T. Johnson, B. J. McCay, S. Takahashi, and K. St. Martin. 2010. Cumulative effects, creeping enclosure, and the marine commons of New Jersey. International Journal of the Commons, 4:367-389.
  Ponce-Diáz, G., W. Weisman, and B. J. McCay. 2009. Co-responsabilidad y participación en el manejo de pesquerías en México: lecciones de Baja California Sur. . Pesca y Conservación, 1:1-9.
• 2009. Fish or Cut Bait: A Guide to the Federal Management System. 3rd revised edition. Fort Hancock, NJ: New Jersey Marine Sciences Consortium. (Bonnie J. McCay, Carolyn F. Creed, and Steven Gray)
• 2008. Against the Grain: The Vayda Tradition in Anthropology and Human Ecology, ed. by Bradley Walters, Bonnie J. McCay, C. Paige West, and Susan Lees. Lanham, MD: Altamira Press.
• McCay, B. J., and W. Weisman. 2007. Greening the Red Rock Lobster: Ecolabeling and Control in a Mexican Fishery. Paper presented to annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, November 27-December 2, 2007, Washington, D.C. (Session Anthropology and Sustainability: Issues, Outcomes and Experiences in Mexican Fisheries and Coastal Communities, organized by Maria Cruz Torres).
• Johnson, T. 2007. Integrating Fishermen and Their Knowledge in the Science Policy Process: Case Studies of Cooperative Research in the Northeastern U.S. . Doctoral Dissertation thesis, Rutgers the State University.
• McCay, B. J. 2004. ITQs and Community: An Essay on Environmental Governance. Review of Agricultural and Resource Economics, 33:162-170.
• McCay, B. J. 2003. Women's rights, community survival, and the fisheries cooperative of Fogo Island. In R. Byron (ed.), Retrenchment and Regeneration in Rural Newfoundland, pp. 158-176. University of Toronto Press, Toronto.
• 2002. Enclosing the Commons: Individual Transferable Quotas in a Nova Scotia Fishery. St. John’s, Newfoundland: Institute of Social and Economic Research, (Richard Apostle, Bonnie McCay, and Knut Mikalsen).
• McCay, B. J. 2000. Property Rights, The Commons, and Natural Resource Management. In M. D. Kaplowitz (ed.), Property Rights, Economics, and the Environment,, pp. 67-82. JAI Press, Stamford, CT.
• McCay, B. J., W. Weisman, and C. F. Creed. in press. Coping with Environmental Change: Systemic Responses and the Roles of Property and Community in Three Fisheries. In R. Ommer, I. Perry, P. Cury and K. Cochrane (eds.), World Fisheries: A Social-ecological Analysis. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford.
• McCay, B. J. 1999. 'That's Not Right': Resistance to Enclosure in a Newfoundland Crab Fishery. In D. Newell and R. Ommer (eds.), Fishing People, Fishing Places: Issues in Canadian Small-Scale Fisheries, pp. 301-320. University of Toronto Press, Toronto.
• McCay, B. J., and S. Jentoft. 1998. Market or Community Failure? Critical Perspectives on Common Property Research. Human Organization, 57:21-29.
• 1998. Community, Market and State on the North Atlantic Rim: Challenges to Modernity in the Fisheries. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. (Richard Apostle, Gene Barrett, Petter Holm, Svein Jentoft, Leigh Mazany, Bonnie McCay, and Knut Mikalsen).
• 1998. Oyster Wars and the Public Trust: Property, Law and Ecology in New Jersey History. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press.
• Wilson, D. C., and B. J. McCay. 1998. How The Participants Talk About "Participation" in Mid-Atlantic Fisheries Management. Ocean & Coastal Management, 41:41-69.
• McCay, B. J., Richard Apostle, Carolyn Creed, Alan C. Finlayson, and K. Mikalsen. 1995. Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs) in Canadian and US Fisheries. Ocean and Coastal Management, 28:85-116.
• 1992. The Helyar Experience; Cooperative Living at the Agricultural and Cook Campus of Rutgers University. New Brunswick, N.J.: The Helyar House Association. Bonnie J. McCay, editor.
• Feeny, D., Fikret Berkes, Bonnie J. McCay, and J. M. Acheson. 1990. The tragedy of the commons : twenty -two years later. Human Ecology, 18:1-19.
• McCay, B. J., and J. M. Acheson. 1987. The Question of the Commons : The Culture and Ecology of Communal Resources. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.
• 1987. The Question of the Commons; The Culture and Ecology of Communal Resources. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. (Bonnie J. McCay and James M. Acheson, eds.).
  Committee and Outreach Books
• McCay, B. J. 1981. Optimal Foragers or Political Actors: Ecological Analyses of a New Jersey Fishery. American Ethnologist, 8:356-382.
• McCay, B. J. . 1978. Systems Ecology, People Ecology, and the Anthropology of Fishing Communities. Human Ecology, 6:397-422.
• McCay, B. J. 1976. Appropriate Technology and Coastal Fishermen of Newfoundland. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms. Doctoral Dissertation thesis, Columbia University.
• Vayda, A. P., and B. J. McCay. 1975. New directions in ecology and ecological anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology, 4:293-306.

Biography | Current Research | Selected Publications | Teaching/Taught

Teaching/Taught

Spring 2012

11:374:428 Topics in Environmental and Resource Policy: Marine Fisheries Policy (3 credits)

Spring 2011

11:374:428 Topics in Environmental and Resource Policy: Marine Fisheries Policy (3 credits)

Spring 2010

11:374:314 Natural Resource Policy (3 credits)

11:374:428 Topics in Environmental and Resource Policy: Marine Fisheries Policy (3 credits)