# c08 — Coastal fishery intervention design

Working (discarded before grading). Nine-step fixed pipeline, each step once, in order.

## Step 1 — Problem statement
- **Decision:** Choose an intervention design that brings a single demersal stock back to its MSY-supporting range while keeping the dependent fishing community economically alive.
- **Bounds / actors:** ~120 small-boat operators across 5 villages; downstream fish-processing buyers; one regulator with total-allowable-catch (TAC) authority but a history of deferring to industry; a biologist supplying stock assessments. Open-access in practice (no enforced individual quotas). Current harvest ≈ MSY + 20%. Recruitment-collapse threshold 4–7 years out on current trajectory.
- **Success:** Biomass returns to MSY-supporting range within 10 years AND aggregate (cohort-averaged) fisher income falls <20%.
- **Failure:** Stock collapse OR a regime that pushes the bottom-quartile operators below subsistence.
- **Key tensions:** the cut must happen fast enough to beat the collapse horizon, but the distributional shock must be small enough (cohort-level) and protective enough (bottom-quartile) to be accepted; and the rule-setter is capturable, so a one-shot quota will be eroded.

## Step 2 — Operative primes (search_prime / search_by_facets; err toward inclusion)
Semantic search on the domain-stripped meta-model + a 6-facet decomposition surfaced:
- **tragedy_of_the_commons** (open-access rivalrous depletion; private benefit / shared cost; 1/N cost-share) — the core.
- **free_riding** / **public_goods** / **scarcity** (commons family).
- **tipping_points_or_phase_transitions**, **reversibility_horizon**, **regime_change**, **irreversibility** (the 4–7 year collapse threshold; recovery becomes infeasible past it).
- **regulatory_capture** + **conflict_of_interest** + **no_one_is_above_the_rules** (regulator defers to industry).
- **commitment_device** + **trust** + **informal_enforcement** + **authority_delegation_under_uncertainty** (credible binding so no one defects first; legitimacy/buy-in).
- **moral_hazard** / **externality** (cost-benefit split, mispricing).
- **equity / fairness / proportionality** + **constrained allocation** (allocate a binding cap without sinking the weakest).
- **adaptive_capacity / feedback** (rule must track resource condition).

## Step 3 — Salience rank (load-bearing relevance)
1. tragedy_of_the_commons — the generative engine of the whole problem.
2. reversibility_horizon / tipping_point — sets the *clock*; makes "defer" itself a failure mode.
3. regulatory_capture — explains why a naive TAC will be hollowed out.
4. commitment_device + trust/legitimacy — the mechanism by which restraint becomes self-sustaining.
5. equity / proportional allocation — the binding success constraint (bottom-quartile subsistence, cohort income).
6. monitoring + graduated sanctions + feedback/adaptive cadence — operational glue.
7. moral_hazard / free_riding — diagnostic, mostly subsumed by the commons engine.

## Step 4 — Operative subset (~3–9) with rationale
Keep: **tragedy_of_the_commons** (engine), **reversibility_horizon/tipping_point** (timing constraint), **regulatory_capture** (institutional failure to neutralize), **commitment_device + legitimacy/trust** (how restraint sticks), **equity/proportional allocation** (the distributional success bar), **monitoring + graduated sanctions + adaptive cadence** (enforcement & adaptivity). Drop as standalone: free_riding/moral_hazard/scarcity (absorbed into the commons engine), speculative_bubble/cognitive_depletion (false positives from broad embeddings).

## Step 5 — Context-specific model (typed relational structure)
Nodes / edges (prime annotations in brackets):
- Stock S —`depleted_by`→ Operators (×120) [tragedy_of_the_commons; each gets full private catch, bears 1/120 of depletion cost].
- Stock S —`approaching`→ Collapse threshold T (4–7 yr) [reversibility_horizon, tipping_point; past T recovery infeasible].
- Operators —`heterogeneous_in`→ capacity (top vs bottom quartile) [equity: uniform cut is regressive].
- Operators —`sell_to`→ Processors [downstream income coupling].
- Regulator —`has_authority_over`→ TAC, but —`defers_to`→ Industry [regulatory_capture; conflict_of_interest].
- Biologist —`supplies`→ assessment of S and T [monitoring signal; legitimacy basis if independent].
- Restraint by any one operator —`benefits`→ all, —`costs`→ self [commitment problem; needs commitment_device + trust].

## Step 6 — Meta-model (domain stripped)
Many independent agents draw rivalrously from one shared regenerating stock under open access; private benefit / shared cost drives aggregate extraction above the renewal rate; a slow state variable is nearing an irreversible threshold; the agent empowered to impose a binding limit is captured by the agents it must constrain; agents are heterogeneous so any uniform limit crushes the weakest; and unilateral restraint is individually irrational, so the limit only holds if it is credibly committed, legitimately allocated, observably monitored, and adaptively re-tuned to the state variable.

## Step 7 — Candidate solution archetypes (find_archetypes_for_prime, get_archetype; search_archetype fallback)
- **commons_governance** (source prime: tragedy_of_the_commons) — spine. Bound resource → access/use rules → use limit tied to observable condition → monitoring → graduated proportional sanctions → replenishment → legitimacy + adaptation cadence. Explicit failure modes include *capture by powerful users* and *illegitimate exclusion* — directly on point.
- **irreversible_commitment_management** — handles the threshold: mark the point of no return, raise scrutiny *before* crossing, stage exposure, compare irreversible risk of action vs inaction (deferral is itself irreversible harm here).
- **authority_legitimacy_and_consent_foundations** — neutralizes capture: mandate + bounded scope + competence evidence (independent assessment) + affected-party voice + conflict-of-interest guardrail + accountability/review + legitimacy health monitoring.
- (search_archetype fallback also surfaced option_preservation, constrained_resource_allocation, balance_preservation — folded in as mechanisms, not separate spines.)

## Step 8 — Reason via both views; reconcile
Context view: a TAC alone fails because (a) capture erodes it, (b) a uniform cut sinks the bottom quartile, (c) it does not change the race-to-fish incentive. Meta-model view: commons_governance supplies the missing structure (limit + monitoring + sanctions + legitimacy + adaptation); irreversible_commitment_management says the cut must front-load before T and treat delay as the dangerous irreversible act; authority_legitimacy says the cap must be co-set with the users and ring-fenced from industry deference to survive. Reconciliation: a co-governed, condition-indexed catch limit, allocated progressively, monitored transparently, enforced with graduated sanctions, ratcheted on a fixed cadence toward MSY — with a buffer/exception fund cushioning the weakest.

## Step 9 — Fit / anti-signatures; drop trips; final design
- commons_governance anti-signatures: "fully private, no spillover" (no — open access), "underproduction of a non-rival good → public_goods_provision" (no — this is over-extraction of a rivalrous stock), "central authority can allocate without legitimacy/enforcement problems" (no — that is exactly the captured-regulator trap). → **passes, and its capture failure-mode is the warning we design against.**
- irreversible_commitment_management anti-signatures: "ordinary reversible change," "paralysis by irreversibility." We avoid paralysis by *acting now with staged limits*, and explicitly weigh inaction's irreversible cost. → **passes as the timing layer.**
- authority_legitimacy anti-signatures: "legitimacy theater / consent manufacturing," "purely technical, binds no one." We require *substantive* voice + conflict guardrails, not ceremony. → **passes as the anti-capture layer.**
None tripped. Output below.

COST: ~9 operations (1 corpus_stats + 4 search_prime/facets + 1 search_archetype + 5 get_prime/get_archetype calls; 9 encyclopedia tool calls total incl. corpus_stats; search_by_facets used), ~32k tokens.

===RECOMMENDATION_BEGIN===
Treat the four-to-seven-year collapse window as the binding fact: every year of deferral is a loss that cannot be bought back later, so the first move is to act now rather than wait for consensus, while making the early steps small enough to be survivable and adjustable.

Replace open access with a single, science-anchored total catch limit that is explicitly tied to the measured condition of the stock, not negotiated against landings pressure. Set this year's limit to remove the overshoot on a glide path: cut total catch toward the sustainable yield over the first three years (roughly a third of the needed reduction per year), then hold and let measured biomass dictate further moves. The limit must be published as a formula keyed to the biologist's assessment, so that when the stock recovers the limit rises automatically — this turns restraint into a visible promise of future reward rather than an open-ended sacrifice, and it removes the incentive to lobby the number down each season.

Allocate the limit as individual, non-transferable (or only locally transferable) shares, distributed progressively rather than uniformly. Give every registered operator a guaranteed floor share sized to subsistence, then distribute the remainder in proportion to recent track record. A flat percentage cut is regressive and would push the smallest boats under; a floor-plus-proportional split protects the bottom quartile while still concentrating most of the reduction on the largest harvesters, who can absorb it. Because the success test is cohort-averaged income, pair the share system with two cushions: a transition fund (financed by a small levy on landings and on downstream processor margin) that pays stewardship and gear-conversion stipends to the smallest operators during the drawdown, and seasonal or area closures that let effort be redeployed (off-season maintenance work, restoration, monitoring) rather than simply lost.

Make the limit credible by co-setting it. The decision body that sets each year's number must include elected representatives from all five villages and the processors, the independent biologist, and the regulator, with a written charter that fixes its scope, bars anyone with a direct financial stake from the final vote, and publishes the reasons for each decision. This is the deliberate counter to a regulator that has historically deferred to the industry: legitimacy and a conflict-of-interest firewall, not just authority, are what keep the cap from being hollowed out. Voice for the affected operators buys the compliance that pure enforcement cannot.

Make use and stock condition visible. Require simple catch reporting at landing sites, cross-checked against processor purchase records (the processors become an enforcement asset, since their buying is already metered), and publish a plain dashboard of stock indicators and remaining quota. Enforce with graduated sanctions: a warning and overage-deduction for first violations, escalating fines, and suspension of shares only for repeated or large abuse. Graduated, proportional, locally legitimate sanctions sustain cooperation in a tight community far better than rare harsh punishment, which breeds evasion.

Run the whole arrangement on a fixed annual review cadence. Each year the body compares measured biomass against the recovery glide path and adjusts the next limit by rule: if the stock is tracking or beating recovery, ease the limit and grow incomes; if it is lagging, tighten. Build in an emergency brake — if any indicator signals the stock is approaching the collapse threshold faster than modeled, the limit drops to a precautionary floor immediately, because that boundary cannot be re-crossed.

Final operating rule: **Each year, set a single published total catch limit equal to the biologist-assessed sustainable yield for the current biomass (capped on a three-year glide down from today's overshoot), divide it into individual non-transferable shares with a protected subsistence floor for every operator and the rest proportional to track record, fund a transition cushion for the smallest boats from a landings-and-processor levy, verify catch against processor records with graduated sanctions, set the number through a village-and-regulator body that publishes its reasons and excludes conflicted voters, and re-tune the limit annually by formula against measured stock recovery — loosening as biomass returns and slamming to a precautionary floor the moment the collapse threshold is in reach.**
===RECOMMENDATION_END===
