Fisheries

Of the fish caught by English and Welsh commercial fishing vessels in the English Channel, Western Approaches, Celtic and Irish Seas between 2002 and 2005:

63 per cent ...weighing 24,500 tons, were thrown back over the side. Few if any of these fish would survive because trawling ruptures their swim bladders. Fishermen 'discard two-thirds of catch' Daily Telegraph

It would be exhausting as well as upsetting to explain the tragedy of the world's fisheries. The root causes are probably similar to the parallel fiasco of industrial agriculture: highly visible, noisy and utterly self-interested lobbyists; a focus on yields per dollar to the exclusion of anything else; lack of political courage.... Policy instruments to address the environmental calamity have been useless, focusing mainly on ineffective and inefficient input controls. Farmers in the west seem to accept a downgrading of their role as food producers in favour of glorified landscape gardeners, working for the government and subject to monitoring and surveillance - in return for handsome subsidies from taxpayers and consumers. But it's difficult to see the world's fisheries people, whose identity is bound up with pursuit of a wild resource, in that role.

Perhaps then the state of the world's oceans would be suitable for application of the Social Policy Bond principle? The goal - biological health, expressed as some index of the world's marine plant an animal species - would be shared by almost everyone; it's the means of achieving it that are proving elusive. And, in contrast to perhaps to agriculture, there seems to be no amount of government-backed monitoring that will stop people degrading the environment for their own short-term purposes.

Where the goal can be reliably quantifed and agreed by all; where existing policies are failing; and where there seem to be no other solutions on the horizon: those are criteria that, to me, cry out for a Social Policy Bond approach: in other words, one where people are rewarded for achieving a specified outcome.