The authority to manage natural capital often follows political boundaries rather than ecological. This mismatch can lead to unsustainable outcomes, as spillovers from one management area to the next may create adverse incentives for local decision making, even within a single country. At the same time, one‐size‐fits‐all approaches of federal (centralized) authority can fail to respond to state (decentralized) heterogeneity and can result in inefficient economic or detrimental ecological outcomes. Here we utilize a spatially explicit coupled natural–human system model of a fishery to illuminate trade‐offs posed by the choice between federal vs. state control of renewable resources. We solve for the dynamics of fishing effort and fish stocks that result from different approaches to federal management that vary in terms of flexibility. Adapting numerical methods from engineering, we also solve for the open‐loop Nash equilibrium characterizing state management outcomes, where each state anticipates and responds to the choices of the others. We consider traditional federalism questions (state vs. federal management) as well as more contemporary questions about the economic and ecological impacts of shifting regulatory authority from one level to another. The key mechanisms behind the trade‐offs include whether differences in local conditions are driven by biological or economic mechanisms; degree of flexibility embedded in the federal management; the spatial and temporal distribution of economic returns across states; and the status‐quo management type. While simple rules‐of‐thumb are elusive, our analysis reveals the complex political economy dimensions of renewable resource federalism.

中文翻译：

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可再生资源联邦制的政治经济学

管理自然资本的权限通常遵循政治界限，而不是生态界限。这种失配可能导致不可持续的结果，因为从一个管理区域到另一个管理区域的溢出可能甚至对一个国家内部的地方决策也产生不利的激励作用。同时，联邦（中央集权）权威机构的“一刀切”的所有方法可能无法应对州（中央集权）的异质性，并可能导致低效的经济或不利的生态成果。在这里，我们利用空间明确的自然-人耦合的渔业系统模型，阐明了联邦与州对可再生资源的控制之间的选择所带来的取舍。我们解决了捕捞努力和鱼类种群的动态问题，这些动态是由于联邦管理方法不同而产生的，这些方法在灵活性方面有所不同。从工程学中采用数值方法，我们还解决了表征状态管理结果的开环纳什均衡，其中每个州都在预期并响应其他州的选择。我们考虑传统的联邦制问题（州与联邦管理），以及更多有关将监管机构从一个级别转移到另一个级别的经济和生态影响的当代问题。权衡背后的关键机制包括当地条件的差异是由生物机制还是经济机制驱动；嵌入联邦管理的灵活性程度；各州经济收益的时空分布；以及现状管理类型。虽然简单的经验法则难以捉摸，