An objective approach to the negotiation of allocations from shared living resources

Negotiating procedures for the allocation of shared fishery resources by multiple users have not been formalized, and often place emphasis on historical shares of the harvest. This may not always be compatible with the duty of care for the resource and its environment expressed in Agenda 21 of UNCED. It is suggested here how ancillary considerations, with the consensus of all interested parties, might be included in a resource allocation negotiation, following a procedure which could have broader applications elsewhere. A distinction is made in the negotiating process between the proposal of technical factors by interested parties, their quantification for each party, best accomplished by an impartial review panel, and the relative weightings finally given to each technical factor, decided by negotiation. Negotiations could efficiently focus on these weightings within a spreadsheet matrix of numerical values by interested party and factor. From a hypothetical example, it seems that prior negotiation on which factors to include may be unnecessary with multiple participants: any factor not achieving general consensus will have a low weighting, and a relatively minor influence on the final allocations.