This paper has attempted to address three important reservations to the property-rights approach to fisheries management — equity and monetization, politicization, and uncertainty – by developing a localized resource management structure which mimics a corporation but which does not rely on private capital. It extends some earlier work on distributed governance and it is probably amenable to the co-management perspective. Initial applicability would probably require a specific — and perhaps isolated — local governance setting, as has been the case for a number of producer cooperatives. But in many cases local residents, particularly in heterogeneous communities which include both resource users and conservationists, might find this approach preferable to the on-going political struggles under the current societal regulatory regime or to the distributional prospects promised by the efficiency regime.