This dissertation seeks to understand the pattern of institutional change--increasing privatization of common resources and more tourism development--in response to economic and environmental changes in the Korean fisheries sector. The overall aim is to tease out the institutional characteristics of the coastal economy and resource management in the case study of depressed fishing communities transitioning to tourism.
The proliferation of research on institutional analysis and common resource management enriched our understanding of why a particular path of institutional change and coastal development is taken. Much of the research identified property rights as the key determinant in dictating the course of development. I argue that coastal property relations are central to understanding the dynamics of institutional change and coastal development as they define regulatory mechanisms, and affect the ability of organizations to respond to change. In this context, I examine how common property rights to natural resource are structured and distributed and how they affect fishing communities.
State and local resource management institutions have seldom been studied together in three dimensions: the national and local geographic scales, state and the fishing village cooperative mode of governance, and the common and private ownership of resources. The bifurcated control system of the coast (the local management institution and the state), I claim, is the key to analyzing the pattern of institutional change in the fisheries sector because common resources have both public and private property features, and requires more than state ownership of the coastal resources. The findings in this analysis indicate that state regulations lagged behind the fast changing cooperative response to the economic and environmental change, External input such as external investment and external labor influences the degree of privatization of local common resources, and has accelerated tourism development.