# S1_fishery — Independent grading

Scenario: coastal demersal fishery on a collapse trajectory; harvest ~20% over MSY; recruitment-collapse threshold in 4-7 years; ~120 open-access small-boat operators across 5 villages; deferential regulator. Success = biomass back to MSY range in 10 yrs AND <20% aggregate cohort income drop; failure = collapse OR bottom-quartile pushed below subsistence.

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## Recommendation R1
1. Structural coherence: 9/10 — Seven numbered components (cut → entitlements → monitoring → replenishment → transition → governance → adaptive easing) form a tight closed loop, each explicitly answering a distinct failure pathway.
2. Failure-mode anticipation: 9/10 — Names the central regulator-deference risk, consolidation-of-shares risk, over-cutting-the-weak risk, premature-easing risk, and compensation-promised-but-not-delivered risk.
3. Implementability: 8/10 — Concrete instruments (levy-funded assessment, stewardship pay, processor first-purchase, co-management voting rule) are actionable, though the funding stack (levy + above-floor fees) is asserted more than sized.
4. Mechanism grounding: 9/10 — Specifies the 25-30% front-loaded cut, non-transferable subsistence floor + capped tradable remainder, graduated warning→fee→suspension ladder, and a pre-committed harvest-control band — concrete rules, not exhortation.
5. Stakeholder/equity fit: 9/10 — Directly structures the bottom quartile via a non-transferable floor that "cannot be bought out," targets transition pay at lowest-income operators, and ties in processors so the village economy isn't gutted.
6. Threshold/time-horizon awareness: 9/10 — Cuts deliberately *below* sustainable to build rebuilding margin given the near-irreversible threshold, and demands sustained multi-cycle evidence before easing because recovery is asymmetric.
TOTAL: 53/60

## Recommendation R2
1. Structural coherence: 8/10 — Clean commons framing flows into cap → floored shares → fund → monitoring → council → pre-collapse triggers → review cadence; coherent but the pieces read as sequential prose rather than a fully interlocked system.
2. Failure-mode anticipation: 8/10 — Anticipates buyout of small boats (numbers "look fine" while bottom quartile is destroyed), regulator re-deferral, and proof-arrives-too-late delay; less on compensation-delivery failure.
3. Implementability: 8/10 — Processor-point landing reporting (existing chokepoint) and buyer-funded levy are pragmatic and well-located; transition-fund taper logic is specified.
4. Mechanism grounding: 8/10 — 25-30% cut, baseline + participation-weighted remainder, holding caps, no-trade-below-baseline, graduated penalties, and automatic warning-band step cuts — solid, though the harvest-control "rule" is described less crisply than its triggers.
5. Stakeholder/equity fit: 8/10 — Guaranteed baseline sized to a "typical small boat above subsistence" plus holding cap squarely protects the bottom quartile; argues aggregate income holds via higher-value larger fish and lower race-to-fish costs.
6. Threshold/time-horizon awareness: 9/10 — Explicitly cuts deeper than the 20% overshoot to make the stock *grow*, and adds precommitted pre-collapse step-cuts to "preserve the intervention window instead of waiting for proof that arrives too late."
TOTAL: 49/60

## Recommendation R3
1. Structural coherence: 9/10 — Explicit four-part architecture (limit / division / cushion / governance) with a strong closing synthesis; the "scientific envelope the board cannot vote away" cleanly nests allocation inside a hard ceiling.
2. Failure-mode anticipation: 9/10 — Covers consolidation by outside capital, flat-cut hitting the weakest hardest, regulator loose-enforcement, displacement of incumbents via the recovery burden, and limits ignored if not visibly observed.
3. Implementability: 8/10 — Freeze-entry, leasing-within-cohort-only, dockside cross-check, and standing for crew/small operators/outside reviewer to contest decisions are actionable; income-floor top-up mechanism is concrete.
4. Mechanism grounding: 9/10 — 25-30% buffered cut, written harvest-control rule that "tightens automatically — sharply," equal baseline + history-weighted remainder, lease-not-sell, levy-funded floor with three specified uses, graduated sanctions — richly specified.
5. Stakeholder/equity fit: 9/10 — Progressive allocation justified explicitly ("flat percentage cut falls hardest on boats near subsistence"), bottom-quartile top-up to a subsistence line, no-entry to avoid displacing the cohort, processors pulled into financing.
6. Threshold/time-horizon awareness: 9/10 — Frames the buffer around irreversibility ("overestimating renewal costs the whole fishery"), auto-tightening near the danger zone, easing only as biomass climbs into the productive range over the rebuild period.
TOTAL: 53/60

## Recommendation R4
1. Structural coherence: 8/10 — Well-ordered (freeze → emergency cut + recovery test → village shares + gear rules → self-financing monitoring → structural fix of captured regulator → condition-tied feedback); the village-share choice slightly diverges from the others without fully reconciling per-boat equity.
2. Failure-mode anticipation: 9/10 — Adds the distinctive juvenile-removal failure (shrinking size = future breeders being taken), plus ITQ consolidation, premature relaxation after one good season, and cohort-average hiding bottom-quartile ruin.
3. Implementability: 8/10 — Processor weigh-point levy funding monitoring "at those existing points (no need for intrusive per-boat surveillance)" is the most operationally grounded enforcement design; gear rules (mesh size, spawning closure) are concrete.
4. Mechanism grounding: 8/10 — Quarter-to-third front-loaded cut, harvest-control formula binding the regulator, village shares + per-boat floor, minimum mesh + closed season, landings levy → monitoring + transition fund; village-level allocation is less precisely specified than per-boat share math.
5. Stakeholder/equity fit: 8/10 — Per-boat floor plus village self-management against local knowledge protects the bottom quartile and explicitly warns the cohort average "does not hide ruin in the bottom quartile"; slightly less granular on within-village distribution.
6. Threshold/time-horizon awareness: 9/10 — Strongest on the asymmetry: separate "harder recovery test" requiring several consecutive years of rising CPUE and size before relaxing, front-loaded cut to "pull the trajectory clearly away from the threshold," "entering the danger zone is easy; leaving it safely takes sustained proof."
TOTAL: 50/60

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## Comparison and ranking

All four converge on the same correct skeleton: a science-set, below-MSY buffered cut; shares with a protected floor and anti-consolidation limits; a buyer/levy-funded transition cushion; a capture-resistant co-management board bound by a harvest-control rule; graduated sanctions; and evidence-gated easing. They differ at the margins. R1 and R3 are the strongest: both are the most explicit on *why* the cut goes below MSY (irreversibility), the most rigorous on a non-transferable per-boat floor with hard caps, and the most complete on governance. R3 edges slightly on the "scientific envelope the board cannot vote away." R4 contributes the unique juvenile/mesh-size and existing-chokepoint-monitoring insights but uses coarser village-level allocation, weakening per-boat equity precision. R2 is solid and well-argued but reads as the least structurally interlocked and least granular on equity mechanics.

Best-to-worst: R3 ≈ R1 > R4 > R2.

Adopt: R3 — most rigorous mechanism grounding and the cleanest capture-proof nesting of allocation inside a hard science-set ceiling, while fully engaging bottom-quartile equity and the irreversibility window. (R1 is a near-tie and equally defensible.)
