Upward Mobility in Alaska Fisheries: A Case Study of Permit Acquisition for Crewmembers

Demographic aging is a growing issue in fisheries where the lack of generational turnover has resulted in fewer young people entering, becoming upwardly mobile, and investing in operations, with considerable long-term implications for food security, occupational diversity, and rural communities in particular. Although there is a growing body of qualitative literature dedicated to this issue, little has been done to quantitatively assess upward mobility in fisheries. This study uses a discrete-time duration analysis to examine the factors that contribute to crewmembers acquiring limited entry fisheries permits—a critical investment for an individual's fishing operation—in the highly engaged fishing community of Sitka, Alaska. The analysis was facilitated by the construction of a novel dataset joining crew and permit holders across different datasets that links the same individuals across different modes of engagement in fisheries. The results suggest that individual demographics are strong predictors of mobility, pointing to differentiated time until permit acquisition based on gender and age. While women may be more likely to get permits faster than men, this pattern can in fact belie gendered mobility and access that constrain alternative fishing livelihoods for women or incentivize investing in their own operation. Similarly, different incentives and constraints may manifest themselves with age, while the positive contribution of age to the speed of permit acquisition is also aligned with the greying of the fleet literature and the growing need for capital access. This study also demonstrates the important role of economic factors (cost of capital, employment levels, and fisheries earnings) in mobility patterns, suggesting potential pathways for targeted policies to enhance generational turnover in fisheries. In the face of a potential crisis in generational turnover in fisheries, this analysis demonstrates the necessity of developing multimodal datasets linking individuals and the utility of duration models in examining upward mobility.